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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Reduce memory consumption by re-reading data from file for r

From: Jeff Morriss <jeff.morriss.ws@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:11:50 -0400
Guy Harris wrote:
On Nov 3, 2010, at 11:25 AM, Jakub Zawadzki wrote:

Btw. it's like reinventing swap, so if you want to use your disk as memory,
it's enough to create some big file and do mkswap & swapon.
(Well maybe on 32-bit systems it's not so easy...)

Yes - adding swap space (which happens automatically in a fashion similar to the one you describe in the UN*X running on the machine on which I'm typing this) won't make a 32-bit address space bigger than 2^32 bytes.

And doing "our own swapping" has the distinct advantage that while clicking on a packet (which was reassembled and requires some non-trivial amount of I/O to access) might be slow sometimes, the rest of the UI--and indeed the rest of your computer--remains functional, something that can't be said if you're swapping heavily.