Slicing is a feature designed to cut away parts of a frame. This is often used when there is a need to analyze packet headers only, or the timing of frames. In such situations, where the packet payload is more or less irrelevant, the host data transfer bandwidth and memory requirements can be significantly reduced.
Napatech Network Adapters have different options for the slicing operation, from purely fixed slicing, where the frame size is always truncated to a maximum specified length (e.g. 128 bytes), to various combinations of fixed and dynamic slicing, where the frame size is shortened to a maximum length after a specific protocol has been recognized (e.g. the start of the IP payload + 8 bytes). The dynamic slicing will then take into account any encapsulations or UDP/TCP options when calculating the cut-off point.
