Re: [Ethereal-users] Large memory footprint

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 11:42:15AM -0700, Chris Robertson wrote:
> A quick follow-up note on this.  I found that if I run Ethereal on a remote
> machine and then pipe the display back to my workstation the memory
> requirements are cut roughly in half.  For example the capture that was
> requiring 600MB of RAM when running locally would only require 300MB when
> run on a remote machine and not significantly more RAM on my local machine
> for the display.

How are you measuring the memory requirements?

If the only thing your workstation is doing is running the X server,
that's a bit surprising - I wouldn't expect it to take 300MB to display
that stuff, as there shouldn't be an item on the X server for every row
in the list of packets, including those not being displayed.

Or is that 300MB the total (virtual) address space used by the X server,
rather than the delta between the address space used by the X server
when Ethereal isn't running and the address space used when Ethereal is
running?

> I observed this on a couple of Redhat 7.2 so your milage
> may vary on a different distro.

Such as the distribution Sun offers?

	hostname$ uname -sr
	SunOS 5.8

...although the distribution in question is called "Solaris 8". :-)