Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Performance. Ethereal is slow when using large captures.

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2003 19:06:46 -0800

On Nov 13, 2003, at 6:54 PM, Ronnie Sahlberg wrote:
possible optimization:
When we dissect the packet the first time, keep the full edt tree around
and never prune it.

A long time ago, back when Gilbert was first implementing the protocol tree stuff (before that, we were directly building a GtkTree), there was a bug that mean that we didn't free the protocol trees when we were finished with them.

That bug caused my home machine (128MB) to thrash fairly badly when trying to read in a large capture with either a read filter or a color filter (I forget which). (It paged a lot when reading it in with the bug fix, but it paged a lot more with the bug unfixed.)

I suspect "potentially" can be removed from "potentially very memory consuming".

It might not be *as* bad if you free up any representation strings generated.