Because the kernel portion of MAGNeT saves events to a fixed-sized buffer, there is a possibility that events may occur when the buffer is full. In this case, MAGNeT is unable to save the event. MAGNeT keeps track of the number of unrecorded events and reports this information as soon as possible. (See Section 2.2.1 for details.)
Our experience to date indicates that unrecorded instrumentation records rarely occur during the monitoring of actual users. MAGNeT provides the capability of tuning its operation, trading between resource utilization and performance. As discussed in [11], with appropriately tuned values MAGNeT is able to record events with less than a 1% loss when a sender saturates a 100Mbps network for a sustained time. Since the majority of users do not approach continuous network-saturation levels, MAGNeT efficiently records virtually all application-generated network traffic.