Uploaded July 2013 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
This session was recorded at Sharkfest 2013 - UC Berkeley, CA
Are the packet drops in the trace file real? Can your laptop keep up with a 1Gbps stream of data? Do you really need to buy that high-end hardware analyzer to capture?
In this session, we will look at the capture thresholds of common laptops running Wireshark to see at exactly what point they start to drop packets. Additionally, we will examine several different SPAN sessions to see if they really can keep up with the line-rate of the traffic stream, or if they too start dropping packets. This will let us know at what traffic level we need to consider using a hardware analyzer, as well as when using a network TAP is critical. Following the session, we invite you to bring up your laptop for a capture shootout to see what it can do!
Chris Greer is a Network and Application Performance Analyst for Packet Pioneer LLC. He regularly assists companies in getting to the root cause of performance issues that impact IT. Chris provides product and technology training for several analysis vendors, assisting clients in the implementation of monitoring platforms.
This session was recorded at Sharkfest 2013 - UC Berkeley, CA
Are the packet drops in the trace file real? Can your laptop keep up with a 1Gbps stream of data? Do you really need to buy that high-end hardware analyzer to capture?
In this session, we will look at the capture thresholds of common laptops running Wireshark to see at exactly what point they start to drop packets. Additionally, we will examine several different SPAN sessions to see if they really can keep up with the line-rate of the traffic stream, or if they too start dropping packets. This will let us know at what traffic level we need to consider using a hardware analyzer, as well as when using a network TAP is critical. Following the session, we invite you to bring up your laptop for a capture shootout to see what it can do!
Chris Greer is a Network and Application Performance Analyst for Packet Pioneer LLC. He regularly assists companies in getting to the root cause of performance issues that impact IT. Chris provides product and technology training for several analysis vendors, assisting clients in the implementation of monitoring platforms.
