
                            ====================
                                libnids-1.20
                            ====================
	Libnids uses efficient data structures (hash tables), so it imposes as 
little overhead on packets processing as possible. However, in some cases,
packet content must be copies several times, which can result in burst of
CPU activity. The following notes refer rather to libpcap, not libnids, but 
because many people seem to encounter similar performance-related problems 
when running libnids on fast network, this may be worth reading.
	Keep in mind that even if a single packet, belonging to TCP connection 
X, is not delivered to libnids, libnids will likely loose all the following
data in X. Therefore you must avoid packet loss, at all cost. If you use the 
default syslog routine and see messages like "Max number of TCP streams 
reached" or "Too much data in TCP receive queue" then (assuming you are not 
under sophisticated NIDS evasion attack) most likely you are loosing packets. 
	The packet loss usually happens when CPU is busy and cannot handle
all incoming packets. It must be stressed that even if CPU seems to be fairly 
idle (say, load average 10%), during traffic burst it may be unable to queue
all the packets, if the buffer space reserved for packets queuing is too
small. And this is where the problem with libpcap is. It uses rather small
buffers, and there is no API to enlarge them.
	So, we are left with unofficial methods. In case of Linux, libpcap
0.7.1, one can call 
  int rcvbuf=100*1024;
  setsockopt(nids_getfd(),SOL_SOCKET, SO_RCVBUF, &rcvbuf, sizeof(rcvbuf));
This setsockopt doubles (approximately) the default kernel buffers size.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a limit (about 100KB) for buffers
allocated this way, which is way too small.
	Recent Linux 2.4 kernels offer PACKET_RX_RING setsockopt, which is 
supposed to allow to specify arbitrary buffer size. 640 K^H^H^H^H^H 10 MB
buffer ought to be enough for everyone ;) This feature has not yet been 
integrated into libpcap (not in 0.7.1). There are floating some libpcap
patches which merge this capability.
	In case of BSD, you may play with BIOCSBLEN, but I have no experience
with it.
	If you know how to enlarge libpcap buffers on other OS, let me know. 
	A portable solution has been suggested by Yoav Weiss
<sniffer@unpatched.net>. Especially on SMP, it could be beneficial to split a 
libpcap application into two processes. The first one would receive packets 
via libpcap interface, and store them in arbitrarily large buffer; this process
should run with high priority, perhaps even real time one. The second
process, running with low priority, would retrieve packets from the first
process and pass them to higher layers (for example to libnids). However, the 
efficient implementation is nontrivial.
	UPDATE: the current version of libnids adds experimental support for
the solution mentioned above. See the documentation for nids_prm.multiproc for
more information.
