Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] TCP conversation analysis can be expensive, and you can't di
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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2016 17:08:59 -0700
On Apr 25, 2016, at 4:59 PM, Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> When I read the capture file mentioned in bug 12367
> 
> 	https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12367
> 
> it eats about 6-8GB on my machine.
> 
> A large amount of that data is in structures allocated by init_tcp_conversation_data(), which is called by get_tcp_conversation_data() if there isn't already one for the conversation.
> 
> get_tcp_conversation_data() is *always* called by dissect_tcp(), so you can't disable that analysis.
> 
> So if you're reading a large capture file with a lot of TCP connections, make sure you're on a 64-bit machine that has plenty of memory and that either has or can allocate plenty of swap space to back it if necessary.

(Note: the crash on OS X isn't a "I ran out of memory so I'm calling abort()" crash; *maybe* it's running out of memory on Windows, given the "the application requested" message from Windows, but, if so, there's a separate problem on OS X.)