Experimental Evaluation of the Impact of Packet Capturing Tools for Web Services

Network measurement is a discipline that provides the techniques to collect data that are fundamental to many branches of computer science. While many capturing tools and comparisons have made available in the literature and elsewhere, the impact of these packet capturing tools on existing processes have not been thoroughly studied. While not a concern for collection methods in which dedicated servers are used, many usage scenarios of packet capturing now requires the packet capturing tool to run concurrently with operational processes. In this paper we perform experimental evaluations of the performance impact that packet capturing process have on webbased services; in particular, we observe the impact on web servers. We find that packet capturing processes indeed impact the performance of web servers, but on a multi- core system the impact varies depending on whether the packet capturing and web hosting processes are co-located or not. In addition, the architecture and behavior of the web server and process scheduling is coupled with the behavior of the packet capturing process, which in turn also affect the web server's performance.