I did a lot of testing on Toshiba based
laptops on a 1GBit link with about 800Mb/s average traffic.
Personally I would go the highest cpu you
can afford with the least number of cores. OS would have to linux, my own
tests get better filter responses and you main reason is you can avoid the
windows per process memory limit.
Also for long term captures linux will
stay up longer without reboot.
Avoid the SSD at all costs if you are
doing large captures such frequent writes would reduce its lifespan a lot and
highspeed harddrives are more appropriate for fast large block writes (on a non
fragmented disk). SSDs will save your battery, are quieter, and have much
better random access time so for os like windows which makes lots of tiny reads
and writes all over the disk its better. Many SSDs will only write
sequentially and you can get into problems when your partition does not full
onto the right boundary of the sector layout on the disk. Unlike HDs SSDs
often have to erase a previously used sector before writing and if the
Filesystem allocation unit goes across to sectors then you have two erase
cycles before you can even write to the thing.
I would suggest if you can get a system
with two harddrives have one ssd for the os and one hd for the capture would be
ideal.
-Chris
-----Original
Message-----
From:
wireshark-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:wireshark-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Sake Blok
Sent: 20 August 2009 21:48
To: wireshark-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Wireshark-users]
Wireshark Performance on Laptops
I'm in the process of buying a
laptop and I am not sure what to go for. I will use the laptop mostly for
making and analysing tracefiles. I bet some of you had to make the same choice
before, so I might as well learn from your experience :-)
My choices (at the moment) are a
DELL (XPS 16 or 6400) running Linux or a MacBook Pro 17" (all
have a 2.8 or 3.06 Ghz core-2-duo and 4GB or more 1066Mhz DDR3 and either a SSD
or 7200RPM HDD). Does anybody did some performance testing on similar laptops?
- When capturing, how well do Linux
and MacOS/X perform on a full Gbit link?
- When analysing, is there a big
difference in performance between Linux and MacOS/X (using the same CPU
and memory)?
- Did anyone compare Wireshark
(filtering) performance on SSD's and HDD's (7200RPM)?
- What laptops / OS are you
using, how well does it perform and why did you come to choose this
laptop?
