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

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:36:50PM +0200, Michael Tuexen wrote:
> I detected it on FreeBSD 4.8, gtk 1.2.10. I have reproduced it on
> Mac OS X 10.2.6 with 1.2.10 of gtk and glib with a file of approx
> 100000 packets an 10MB on Disc.

OK, so it's GTK+ 1.2.10, so it's not an append-to-the-end-of-the-list
quadratic behavior - and it doesn't append to the list, in any case.

The quadratic behavior is coming from

	1) finding the row that corresponds to a particular frame being
	   done by scanning the list of rows looking for one with that
	   frame as its per-row data, which is linear in the ordinal
	   number of the row (hence overall quadratic behavior);

	2) changing the text of the Nth row being linear in the row
	   number.

The first can, I think, be fixed fairly easily.

The second isn't so easy to fix.

Long term, as noted, the right fix is to completely redo the packet-list
display, but that'll take a while.  Unfortunately, I don't have a good
short-term fix.