Re: [Ethereal-dev] Time to look at performance optimizations again?

[Richard Sharpe <rsharpe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 1 Jan 2005, Yaniv Kaul wrote:

> I'm looking into making Ethereal faster. A great job was done in 0.10.6,
> if I recall correctly, but I'm still not happy with its performance.
>
> Personally, I see 3 possible vectors to 'attack':
> 1. GTK is a bit slow on Windows, imho, and Ethereal spends loads of time
> in it. I'm not going to touch this (donno about GTK enought).
> 2. Specific dissectors that are slow - I'm not sure it's a real
> bottleneck. Is anyone aware of a dissectors that's slowing Ethereal
> down? I'd guess packet-tcp.c, packet-eth.c, packet-ip.c, etc...?
> 3. Infrastructure and general programming improvement - I'd like to have
> a go in this direction, in parallel to #2 above.

I have recently been looking at very large capture files (something of the
order of 600MB or so) and loading and filtering these is very slow, even
on a 1.8GHz P4 Xeon with 4GB of memory, so I was thinking again at looking
at the problems.

I will probably start with a profiled version of Ethereal and see where we
are spending most of our time now to see what can be done, but my work
will only really be on Unix/Linux.

Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]richardsharpe.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org,
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com