Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] slow startup caused by splash_update?

From: Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:48:45 -0700

Jeff Morriss wrote:

Jeremy Linton wrote:

As a FYI:

I have been having problems with startup time (> 1 minute) with a 1.1.2 version compiled from the source tar (suse 11). So I went looking and discovered the majority of the startup time in my situation was actually the splash screen updates.

I replaced the splash_update in the call to epan_init() (gtk/main.c) with a NULL, and that cut the startup time to less than a second. I found some other comments complaining about the number of plug-ins causing slow startups, but it looks like in my case its more a case of trying to update the progress bar on the splash screen causing slow startups than having hundreds of plug-ins.

There have been complaints in the past. At first the splash screen was updating itself for every single dissector and plugin, now it's supposed to be every Nth (or every M milliseconds?).

How are you accessing the system where you're running Wireshark?  ssh?

Maybe Wireshark can/should disable the splash screen when run over ssh? ssh doesn't imply a slow connection but it's probably reasonably common.

If you are forwarding over ssh, are you using 'ssh -X' or 'ssh -Y'? I've had better luck with '-Y', especially over WAN links.

If you want to play with the splash screen update timing, you can adjust REGISTER_FREQ in gtk/about_dlg.c. However, if the splash screen is slow then the rest of the program will likely be slow.