On Apr 28, 2009, at 10:10 AM, Brian Daniel wrote:
I want to take max advantage of my quad processor and RAM. Will the
Windows-XP-Win64 build of WireShark take advantage of the additional
RAM if I upgrade my Windows Vista 64-bit from 4Gig RAM to 8Gig RAM?
A 64-bit version of Wireshark will be able to have more than 4GB of
data in its address space if you have enough RAM (and possibly even if
you don't, if you have enough backing store - paging files and/or
paging partitions - although that means it could be paging stuff into
and out of main memory a lot). Wireshark will do so only if you try
to read in a file large enough to require it.
A 32-bit or 64-bit version of Wireshark will, on a machine with more
than 4GB of RAM and an operating system that supports that RAM as
general paging memory (rather than the specialized support offered by
32-bit versions of Windows), be able to, even if it doesn't have more
than 4GB of data in its address space, share that memory with more
programs or bigger programs, so, *if* you're running other stuff that
could compete with Wireshark for memory, and that competition is
happening and slowing Wireshark (and the other stuff) down, even a 32-
bit version of Wireshark could work better if you add more memory.
