2025 April OPRA Market Volatility
Its been quite the start of the year where the volatility in the market by most measures has been off the charts. Where there’s volatility, there are packets. Where there are packets, there is Packet Capture! How did your capture solution handle the traffic last week?
By most measures 2025 April 3rd (Thursday) had the most volume since the 2020 COVID pandemic. At FMADIO we have a test system in NY2 capturing the full OPRA feed, connected with 2 x100G QSFP28 links. The general though is, if you can capture OPRA then you can capture anything. So how did we do?
The below graph uses the builtin FMADIO telemetry used to monitor the health of the capture system. It shows that actually the 4th (Friday) had even more traffic (just under 30TB) than the 3rd (Thursday). Keep in mind the below is only the Feed A, if you wanted to capture both feeds that would be 50TB (4th) and 60TB (5th) in total storage required.
2025 April 4th OPRA Data Capture
Monday - 22.2TB
Tuesday - 22.4TB
Wednesday - 22.6TB
Thursday - 26.4TB
Friday - 29.5TB
Thats quite a bit of data to process. We dropped a total of 0 packets! the system barely broke a sweat capturing that. Below is the Capture rate vs Drop count vs the CPU utilization.
FMADIO OPRA 2025 April 0 packet drops
Looking in more detail, and the largest sustained traffic burst was on the 3rd around 14:33 EDT, peeking around 31.7Gbps. Keep in mind that’s not a 31Gbps microburst, that’s a sustained 31.7Gbps for 1sec!
2025 OPRA Market Peek data rate
Digging a bit deeper, and its quite clear the network bottlenecks seen (remember we are on the new 100G hand off from OPRA). The image below is calculating microbursts at the 100usec level. Its pretty clear most of the exchanges feeding OPRA are almost entirely on 10G links (e.g. 7-8Gbps peeks with small packets).
2025 April OPRA Microbursts
zooming in per below
Peek microburst
… and based on the above, its now official 55Gbps peek microburst on the OPRA link. If your on 40G OPRA links that microburst would have been queued.
If you dropped packets last week CONTACT FMADIO.
