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After a look at an intrusion detection system, I saw the following statement :

"The IDS is able to analyse 10.000 characters (from packets) in 0.17ms" and I wanted to know the throughput in Gbps.

So I came up with the following solution but I would like someone to tell me if I do something wrong here. (the 8 comes from the fact that 1char = 8 bit)

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This actually gives me :

enter image description here

So, I have 0.438269447 in Gbps ? but I was confused looking at this website, does that mean my answer is in Gbps or GB/s

(and does this mean, that the IDS is able to analyse almost half of the packets sent on a 1Gbps NIC)

Thank you.

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  • Keep in mind that depending on how the particular IDS works and your configuration of the device, it may not need to analyse every byte of data that passes through it. So the actual throughput of the IDS may be much higher than the the amount of data it analyses.
    – YLearn
    Commented Sep 18, 2013 at 15:21

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tl;dr: gigabits per second (Gbps)

Your 470588235 is bits-per-second. 8 bits per character; cancels the characters unit in the numerator, leaving your bits per second overall. "bps" (as in, Gbps, Mbps, Kbps) means "bits per second", versus the "B" (as in GB, MB, KB) meaning "byte(s)".

The "G" prefix normally means the metric "giga", which is 1,000^3 (or 10^9). So you would -- as you've shown -- shift the decimal nine spots. Giving you about 0.4Gbps.

Note that the kilo, mega, giga, etc concepts can also be used in a binary (base-2 math) context. That is written as "Ki" (meaning x1024, instead of "K" meaning x1,000), "Mi" meaning x1024^2 (instead of M meaning x1,000^2.)

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