[Bro-Dev] early performance comparisons of CAF-based run loop

Siwek, Jon jsiwek at illinois.edu
Thu Apr 13 12:52:38 PDT 2017


> On Apr 12, 2017, at 10:19 PM, Clark, Gilbert <gc355804 at ohio.edu> wrote:
> 
> Also, relative overhead of packet ingest is going to vary based on the set of loaded scripts in addition to the specific trace used to run the tests.  That's not trying to argue that these results are not useful / interesting, but instead *only* that the specific percentages might not be representative of the general case (just because I'm convinced that there really is not a general case to objectively measure).

I agree, the specific numbers here aren’t generalizable, but I think that’s ok and we can still infer that the different runloop implementation doesn’t raise any obvious performance concern.  That being due to (1) with the tests using the default set of Bro scripts, I’d expect it to be more common for users to have more complicated scripts and highly customized deployments such that the relative overhead decreases further and becomes more irrelevant than the tests show and (2) even if the specific pcaps tested were at either end of the spectrum in terms of how much work is required to process them, it still shows that the relative overhead differences are minimal.

i.e. I think we’d only be in trouble interpreting the results if the tests showed a significant relative overhead difference.  Since then we don’t know if the given pcaps where just “easy” ones for Bro to process.

- Jon



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