Introduction:

 Nitpicker is simple, Nitpicker is efficient, Nitpicker is Open Source.
 Nitpicker is the free IP Flow Accounter.
 It started because the commercial accounting software was just not fast,
 precise and reliable enough to fit a today's ISP / MSP requirements. 

Here are some of the large benefits of nitpicker above other accounting software: 
 - It is 100% free
 - It is Public Domain.
 - It is designed for speed
 - It is designed to run reliable under djb's daemontools
 - It consumes minimal processor power
 - It also runs with little memory
 

Description:

 Nitpicker is (currently) running under *BSD and Linux.
 It is designed for the berkley packet filter (BPF).
 (Sun Solaris(c) packet filter is currently examined).
 Linux doesn't have a device like the bpf,
 so you need to have libpcap ( Notice: We strongly recommend using *BSD )
 Nitpicker accesses the raw ethernet frames and reads the header informations. 
 Nitpicker will write the flows into a file when there are n flows in the savequeue.
 They are moved there after n seconds passed since the flowstart
 (This prevents never-ending flows like news to be written too) 

 The flowfile is called flow.<unixtimestamp>.u At the end of a dumping period,
 the .u files will be renamed to *.s, and new .u files will be created 
