[OT - interface bandwidth] was: Sampled Traffic Analysis by Internet-Exchange-Level Adversaries

[coderman]

On 5/29/07, Tony <Tony at tdrmail.co.uk> wrote:
> Windows has offered over 10 Gigabit throughput on a workstation (running Windows Server 2003) since 2005...

veering off topic here, but the vast majority of 10GigE devices have
hardware TCP offload support, which is how OS stacks can push toward
the line limits.  without offload support the checksum and tcp
protocol overhead vastly reduces throughput and taxes the processor.

so inspecting packets at line rates, even simple header matching,
becomes problematic.  if you look at devices designed to do this kind
of inspection on 10GigE and equivalent links (cloudshield, narus, etc)
they all use either custom ASIC's or FPGA's to offload matching.

best regards,