Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Question regarding performance

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 11:34:09AM +0200, Michael Tuexen wrote:
> when I load a large .pcap file and after that I change the style of the
> time column from 'time since beginning of capture' to 'since last frame'
> the progress seems to be fast at the beginning and slows down towards 
> the end. Shouldn't the process be at a constant rate?

On what platform are you doing this, and what version of GTK+ do you
have installed?

One possible problem is that GTK+ isn't 1.2.8 or later (I think the
version was 1.2.8) - prior to 1.2.8 (or whatever the version was), it
appended to the list of elements in a GtkClist (the widget used to
display the packet list) by scanning to the end of the list and adding
there (the word "quadratic" comes to mind here...); I sent them a patch
to use the end-of-list pointer that was already present, turning
quadratic into linear, and I think it got into 1.2.8.

(Actually, that particular process should take a constant *time*, not
proceed at a constant *rate*, but to do that, I need to get the "virtual
clist" stuff working, and to do *that*, I need to get some other stuff,
such as support for reasonably fast random access to gzipped captures,
working....)