network interface packets count vs bytes [closed]

Question

I am looking at RX and TX stats taken from my ADSL modem/router (DLink DSL-2750B).

I can't figure out how to make sense of the RX/TX packets vs RX/TX bytes.

br0             Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 6C:72:20:FC:AC:FE
          inet addr:192.168.1.1  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::6e72:20ff:fefc:baef/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:47818791 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:76577323 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:11029761868 (10.2 GiB)  TX bytes:75743327574 (70.5 GiB)

Looking at packets stats, RX is about 2 times TX Looking at bytes, RX is 1/8th of TX.

Is this reasonable?

Answer 1

Is this reasonable?

Yes, most likely.

Depending on the workload, one direction might be mostly small requests, the other much larger replies.

A bit of traffic analysis might solve the mystery.

Answer 2

First a clarification, as I think you mean: "Looking at packets stats, RX is about 1/2 times TX" and not 2 times i.e. RX=47818791 is approximately one half of TX=76577323

Yes, I would say this it's quite possible (if that's what you mean by reasonable) for the packet count ratio to be different from the byte count ratio between RX and TX. Packets are not of a fixed byte size, so you could easily have different ratios. Especially if you had lots of different connections passing through your ADSL modem/router - although it's not essential for there to be multiple connections in order to have the different ratios. An example of packets with different sizes would be a large file download where in one direction there are small acknowledgement packets and in the other direction there are large packets filled with data from the file being downloaded.