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UDP packet drop issue in Wireshark while wiritng to pcap file

Ask Time:2014-09-17T18:41:39         Author:SameedSohail92

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My FPGA is continuously sending UDP packets on network using 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet. I am using Wireshark to capture the packets directly to a .pcap file & then extract & display UDP data in Matlab GUI. FPGA kit is connected to a 1 Gbps switch and then to PC.

Initially i tried using Matlab's built in UDP object instead of .pcap files but using that i was facing packet drop issue at high BW (>1 Mbps) and was only able to achieve drop free reception for very low BW around 110 kbps. That was not acceptable for my case. A link to the problem is given below:

Incorrect UDP data reception in Matlab

Based on these problems i moved towards using Wireshark. I use wireshark to create multiple .pcap files (1 Mb) of UDP data and then start extracting UDP data from these files in Matlab. A link also guided towards this approach i.e. writing packets directly to file(High speed UDP receiver in MATLAB ).

The problem is that i am getting some packets dropped at random intervals. The problem is very frequent when operating at High Ethernet BW - 220 Mbps. So i reduced my BW to around <50 Mbps still i get some packet drops. I tried using some of the tips provided by Wireshark (http://wiki.wireshark.org/Performance) for optimizing performance but still the issue persists.

This seems to be issue with memory as far as i have understood.

Some details about the design:

UDP Data Size = 64 Bytes
Ethernet Frame Size = 110 Bytes 
PCAP File Size = 1 Mb
Wireshark Buffer Size = 1 Gb

Please guide me towards a possible solution.

Regards,

Sameed

Author:SameedSohail92,eproduced under the CC 4.0 BY-SA copyright license with a link to the original source and this disclaimer.
Link to original article:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25888446/udp-packet-drop-issue-in-wireshark-while-wiritng-to-pcap-file
Tim Champion :

I would suggest a larger file size may provide efficiency savings, something like 64MB. Also agree with Slava's suggestion - tcpdump is more efficient/robust than the wireshark GUI. ",
2014-09-18T08:28:17
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