Re: [ethereal-dev] Ethereal memory leakage fix and feature enhancement

[Jeff Jahr <jjahr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, Guy Harris wrote:

> > DNS queries are the performance hog that I notice most frequently...
> 
> Are those DNS queries that just take a lot of time, or that get stuck?

Ones that take a lot of time.  
 
> Ethereal remembers the result of a DNS query, so it shouldn't be
> querying for any name more than once - and it remembers negative
> results, so it shouldn't be retrying queries that timed out or otherwise
> failed.  However, I still see "ethereal -n" loading significantly faster
> than "ethereal" on files that I don't *think* have a boatload of
> different IP addresses in them.

It only takes a handful of dns timeouts or slow replies to seriously bog
down the program.  If you have 4 seperate addresses that take 15 seconds
apiece to resolve, you are already at one minute of load time...

I usually skip the -n option, but if ethereal appears to lock up for more
than 30 seconds or so during a load, i kill it and try again without dns.

-jsj