Network Monitoring Appliance Looks Below 1 Microsecond

eweekhickins writes "Corvil has unveiled a new tool to help network managers cope with increasing pressure to improve performance. This appliance, from the Dublin-based company (with backing from Cisco), passively monitors traffic across networks in segments below 1 microsecond in length and correlates monitoring data with remote appliances and gives a complete picture of latency, jitter, packet loss and other phenomena that affect network and application performance. Corvil CEO Donal Byrne noted that 'If you can drop a millisecond [of latency] off, you're a hero.'"

Comments

Time for token ring?

[khasim]

Some applications are natively sensitive to latency and jitter. Consider VOIP or teleconferencing, or algorithmic stock trading.

I guess that would depend upon where both points are. One has to be on your network. The other ... ?

Now, with Ethernet, one machine can hog the switch (I'll guess that they aren't using hubs). What use is shaving a millisecond off the app if you're still vulnerable to someone else hogging the network at the moment that you're trying to complete your transaction?

Re:buffering .........

[Passresv]

Hey Khasim. Can I say, I have to disagree. Analysing latency on large networks is incredibly important. There are often so many latency-inducing mechanisms between a packet leaving an application and arriving at the other end (misconfigured stacks, poor cabling, misconfigured routers and switches (#1 cause!), greedy applications, messy applications, multicast floods etc etc), that it is impossible to tell what the problem is. Modern networks are straining with latency problems that added bandwidth doesn't always solve. The problem is that if you have a large number of servers and clients and there's a problem - which codebase or hardware do you upgrade? You can't tell, because you don't know who's causing the problem. Only by analysing the network can you tell. As a developer, I use wireshark for this often to find out what the trouble is - asking other coders doesn't help - only when I look at the network I can pinpoint the problem - if you fail to configure your video service properly, a group of managers having a v-conference can blot out your network. But you won't know its happening because its off in building #5 somewhere - nowhere near your main servers.