How To Allocate The Reserved Ram - Network Instruments GigaStor User Manual

Figure 17: How packets move through Observer's memory
The capture card receives data off the network.
The capture card passes data into RAM. In the RAM it goes into the packet capture buffer and the
statistics queue buffer.
The statistics queue buffer passes the information to the statistics memory configuration.
The statistics memory configuration passes the data to the real-time graphs.
The Network Trending Files receive data from the statistics queue buffer through the NI trending service,
where they are written to disk.
The following steps occur only if you are writing the data to disk through a packet capture to disk or a GigaStor
capture.
If you are using packet capture to disk, the packet capture buffer passes the data to the operating system's disk.
If you are using GigaStor capture, the statistics queue buffer and the packet capture buffer passes the
information to the RAID.
A few notes about how some buffers are used:
Packets received by the statistics queue buffer are processed and put in the collected statistics buffer.
Data for network trending comes from the statistics queue buffer, then it is written to disk, and finally
flushed from the buffer every collection period.
The collected statistical buffer does not use first-in, first-out to determine statistics. Therefore, after the
statistic limit is reached the remaining data is no longer counted; however, data for known stations
continue to be updated indefinitely.
Regardless of whether Observer is using reserved memory, the statistics memory, statistics queue buffer,
and packet capture buffer function the same. The storage space available for storing packets in memory
increases though when you reserve memory.

How to allocate the reserved RAM

If you have a lot of network traffic, then you may need to allocate at least one gigabyte of RAM to the packet
capture buffer, the statistics queue buffer, or both.
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