Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Column data memory allocation - excessive?

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stephen Fisher wrote:
> One place where there are a lot of calls to the unsafe strcpy() is 
> epan/column-utils.c.  However, before replacing them with g_strpcpy(), I 
> wanted to ask if there is any reason we can't start using dynamic memory 
> allocation in those places (as Guy recently suggested) instead of 
> g_strlcpy()?

I'm not sure I'd suggested that - I've mainly been concerned about the 
memory allocation internal to GTK+ for the column displays, rather than 
stuff Wireshark itself allocates.

> We are allocating full field widths worth of memory for every column 
> (256 bytes each) plus the info column (4096 bytes each) for every row in 
> the build_column_format_array() function (in epan/column.c) ahead of 
> time and then strcpy() data into them.

For every row?  I might be misremembering, but I think only one set of 
column string buffers are allocated at start-up time, and those buffers 
are reused.