Port mirroring with ALOT of Drops Tx on a 5406zl

It seems hard to find info about this specific problem so ANY related input is appreciated (I tried HP-forum and stackoverflow but no luck).

Question #1.

I've set up port mirroring this way on my HP procurve J8697A Switch 5406zl (Software revision K.15.12.0015)

sw-dh-1(config)# show monitor 1 Network Monitoring

Session: 4 Session Name: Mirror Destination: B13 (Port)

Monitoring Sources Direction Truncation Mirror Policy

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Port: F1 Both No - Port: F2 Both No - Port: F3 Both No -

sw-dh-1# show monitor 2

Network Monitoring

Session: 3 Session Name: Mirror Destination: A6 (Port)

Monitoring Sources Direction Truncation Mirror Policy

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Port: A7 Both No - Port: B6 Both No - Port: B10 Both No - Port: Trk5 Both No - Port: Trk9 Both No - Port: Trk11 Both No -

See output of "show interface" below. I'm worried about "Drop Tx". What does that mean exactly? Are mirrored packets dropped or does this mean that the ordinary traffic on the monitoring ports are also affected? If yes, how? Data loss, resending packets, loss of speed, high CPU load on the switch?

sw-dh-1# show interfaces B13

Status and Counters - Port Counters for port B13

Bytes Rx : 576 Bytes Tx : 4,252,895,128 Unicast Rx : 0 Unicast Tx : 3,440,299,294 Bcast/Mcast Rx : 9 Bcast/Mcast Tx : 412,639,331 Errors (Since boot or last clear) : FCS Rx : 0 Drops Tx : 29,441,235 Alignment Rx : 0 Collisions Tx : 0 Runts Rx : 0 Late Colln Tx : 0 Giants Rx : 0 Excessive Colln : 0 Total Rx Errors : 0 Deferred Tx : 0

sw-dh-1# show interfaces A6

Status and Counters - Port Counters for port A6

Bytes Rx : 960 Bytes Tx : 1,442,037,177 Unicast Rx : 0 Unicast Tx : 1,988,961,810 Bcast/Mcast Rx : 15 Bcast/Mcast Tx : 339,915,002 Errors (Since boot or last clear) : FCS Rx : 0 Drops Tx : 1,647,165,303 Alignment Rx : 0 Collisions Tx : 0 Runts Rx : 0 Late Colln Tx : 0 Giants Rx : 0 Excessive Colln : 0 Total Rx Errors : 0 Deferred Tx : 0

Utilzation and total last 5 minutes is off since I turned the mirroring off when I saw the drops. Utilization when port mirroring was on was 20-35%.

Question #2:

Is it better if I mirror out all traffic to the 10GB port instead? Assuming that it is possible to do port mirroring to the 10GB port?