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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] New packet list: Optimize memory usage

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:43:52 -0700

On Jul 12, 2009, at 12:48 PM, Jakub Zawadzki wrote:

This patch (Proof of Concept) removes allocating memory for columns data,
and makes them 'dynamic' (packets redissected when column data needed)

That should make changing the time format, for example, *extremely* fast - it should just have to redisplay all the rows that are currently on the screen, it won't have to recompute all the column strings. (I.e., it should happen in constant time, not in linear time.)

I haven't seen any visible lags while scrolling,


Try scrolling backwards through a large gzipped file.

(That doesn't say this is the wrong thing to do - I've been advocating this for a while, and made a version of the GTK 1.2[.x] GtkCList with "dynamic" column data and prototyped the same thing - it says we need to make random access to gzipped files faster.)