ra reads argus file very slow

Zi Hu zihu at usc.edu
Tue Nov 5 14:25:30 EST 2013


Hi, Elof,

Thanks for your information.

As I mentioned in my other replies, it looks like "ra" runs slow only on
certain argus files (such as the argus file in my case).
I also tried to run "ra" on another argus file, it is much faster,  not
sure why.

thanks
-Zi


On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 8:46 AM, <elof2 at sentor.se> wrote:

>
> Just as a comparison, I just ran this on a 1.0 GB argus file:
>
> # time ra -nr argus-20131103.09.log > /dev/null
> real    0m51.314s
> user    0m47.367s
> sys     0m2.101s
>
> I now cat a new file (not in any file cache) that is also 1.0 GB in size:
>
> # time (sync; cat argus-20131103.10.log > /dev/null; sync)
> real    0m6.124s
> user    0m0.008s
> sys     0m0.799s
>
>
> This is on a FreeBSD 9.1 amd64 on an ordinary intel server that is pretty
> loaded at the time of the test.
>
> /Elof
>
>
>
> On Wed, 30 Oct 2013, Zi Hu wrote:
>
>  Hi, Carter,
>>
>> In my application, I need a simple tool to read what it is in the argus
>> file, then output certain fields that I am interested in ascii format,
>> such
>> as srcip, dstip, sport, dport. protocol, ....
>>
>> I thought the command "ra" is what I need. However, I find it is very slow
>> to read the argus data with "ra".  I did a small experiment: dump the same
>> argus file (about 2G) with both "ra" and "cat".
>> Using the "ra" command, it took me about 87 minutes to read the file,
>> while
>> it took only 40 seconds to dump it with "cat".  and also I notice that the
>> memory keeps growing when I am running "ra".
>>
>> zihu at proton:~$ time cat
>> 2013-09-01-0700/temp/20130831-223000-hWukIYC-lander4.argus > temp.dat
>>
>> real    0m39.490s
>> user    0m0.027s
>> sys     0m4.204s
>> zihu at proton:~$ time ra -r
>> 2013-09-01-0700/temp/20130831-223000-hWukIYC-lander4.argus -u > temp.dat
>>
>> real    87m40.973s
>> user    86m42.397s
>> sys     0m56.256s
>> zihu at proton:~$
>>
>>
>>
>> So I guess "ra" does more than just reading the argus file, formatting and
>> outputing the result.   Does "ra" keep track of flows in memory so that
>> the
>> memory keeps growing ?
>>
>> If "ra" is not the right choice for my application, then what's the right
>> command for this simple application? Or if we don't have such a tool, I am
>> thinking of writing one by myself. Could you point me where to start?  Any
>> suggestions are welcomed.
>>
>>
>> Thanks
>> -Zi
>>
>>
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