RE: [Ethereal-users] Large memory footprint

[Chris Robertson <Chris.Robertson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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?

top, gtop, etc.
 
> 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?

That's the amount of memory allocated to the Ethereal process itself.
Depending on the system the X server would have 10-20MB (I think it may have
hit 60MB with the largest files) allocated seperately, note the amount of
memory allocated to X doesn't change drastically when running Ethereal
locally or remotely with the large capture files.  So I would see a 300MB
(600MB if local) process for Ethereal and then the X server would have a
seperate 10-20MB allocated.  
 
> > 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". :-)
:) Actually I did test the original problem on a Solaris 8 box (an Ultra5
with 512MB to be exact) and it still had the same memory issues.  I didn't
try exporting the Ethereal display from a Solaris box however I can quite
easily if you would like and let you know if it behaves the same.