If the network monitoring (or network security system) that you’re working with is failing to show you everything that’s happening on the network the problem’s definitely the hardware, right?

Every expert worth their stripes knows that at a given network speed a NIC-based monitoring system will start to drop packets and as a result, the applications that they feed will start to go blind. But the reality is that software applications also have their own failure point beyond which they can’t process the packet flow – regardless of how accurate or complete the stream may or may not be. It turns out how your chosen software application is written has a profound impact on it’s performance at higher network speeds.