Wireshark · Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Date and Time of Day conversion sloowwww

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 17, 2003, at 2:15 PM, Jeremy M. Guthrie wrote:

> > 	1) start Ethereal with the flag "-t ad":
> This worked, now why would passing ethereal the flag allow it to load 
> it just
> fine but loading it, then changing options turn it into a 45 minute 
> job?

Because constructing the list of packets takes an amount of time 
proportional to the number of packets in the file, while modifying it 
for every packet takes an amount of time proportional to the *square* 
of the number of packets in the file, as to change the Nth row requires 
the widget that implements the list to find the Nth row, which takes 
time proportional to N.