Despite the fact that CommTraffic was made with efficiency and robustness in mind, monitoring networks where the traffic volume is high and diverse (many local/remote IP addresses and ports are involved) may greatly increase the amount of memory used by the application, as well as increase the CPU utilization.

CommTraffic offers very advanced traffic analysis tools; however, the other side of the coin is that your computer may not have sufficient resources to produce a report with all the details (local ports, remote ports, remote IP addresses) for a lengthy monitoring period.

Even if you have a powerful computer, we still recommend defining the logging behavior of the program and excluding nonessential information from the log files. Doing so will make the logs more compact, and the program will process them much faster when generating a traffic report.

The following factors affect the program's performance when generating traffic reports (in order of importance):

1.

Length of the reporting period.

2.

Number of fields included in the report (more details – more system resources needed).

3.

Including the Remote IP addresses field in the report (this is the most resource-consuming field).

4.

Number of reports that are open simultaneously.

5.

The Move Active Items To Top option in the report settings puts an additional load on your CPU.

6.

Checkboxes under Settings => Network => Advanced, Traffic log files and statistics include area. These options affect the resources consumed by CommTraffic Service when the Console is closed. The most resource-consuming options are Remote IP and Remote Port.

7.

Local and remote IP resolving options.

The options described below allow you to configure the program to report the traffic statistics efficiently, and still provide sufficient information.

Detailed View

This option is disabled by default and is accessible if you right-click on the report window and select the Options menu item. When this option is disabled, it makes the program display only the root nodes for the particular report, greatly decreasing the time required to generate it. If you use CommTraffic to monitor a network with many hosts, we recommend keeping this option disabled and enable it only when you really need it.

Traffic log files and statistics include

This option is available in the Settings => Network => Advanced window. The four options below determine what information is included in the log files that, in turn, will provide information for the reports. Selecting fewer options makes the log files more compact and allows the program to generate reports faster. The Remote IP address and Remote port options account for the major portion of the system resources utilization.

Local IP address – this option should be enabled if you are monitoring a local network. It allows you to obtain the traffic statistics for each host on your LAN.

Local port – in most cases, this option may be disabled. It is useful only for the computers that act as mail or web servers and offer these services to remote clients. You need to enable this option if you would like to view the Local Ports report in the Reports section.

Remote IP address – this option is responsible for recording all remote IP addresses that the local hosts make connections to. When it is enabled, the log files and their processing time increase significantly.

Remote port – this option allows you to save information about connections to remote services. We recommend keeping this option disabled in large LANs that generate a lot of Internet traffic, unless there is a real need for such information.