Monitoring network traffic on 10 Gbit networks requires very efficient tools capable of exploiting modern multicore computing architectures. Specialized network cards can accelerate packet capture and thus reduce the processing overhead, but they can not achieve adequate packet analysis performance. For this reason most monitoring tools cannot cope with high network speeds.

We describe the design and implementation of ffProbe, a network traffic monitoring application built on top of FastFlow, combined with several optimized parallel programming patterns. We compare ffProbe with two popular network monitoring probes. The results demonstrate that it can scale significantly better with number of cores and thus may be suitable for monitoring 10 Gbit networks using commodity servers.