Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Performance - efficient coding of dissectors

[Yaniv Kaul <ykaul@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Looking at some dissectors, they are not always written too well, 
performance-wise.

- definitions of variables inside loops
- dynamic memory allocation of strings, then strcpy'ing them (instead of 
perhaps declaring them in a static const array)
- proto_tree_add_text(), where it'd make more sense to use 
proto_tree_add_item() - which I suspect in many cases would be more 
efficient.
etc.

I wonder how much of performance improvement we can gain by re-writing / 
optimzing / fixing dissectors.

Obeying to the 80/20 rule, I assume that 80% of the dissection is done 
in 20% of the dissectors (packet-tcp.c, packet-udp.c, ...), and those 
are mostly well written, but still.