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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Memory consumption in tshark

From: Joerg Mayer <jmayer@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 22:26:28 +0200
On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 06:53:01PM +0200, Jakub Zawadzki wrote:
> >> ./tshark -r traffic.all -Y "dns.qry.name.len > 50" -w longnames.pcap
> > 
> >> Used memory grows continuously, up to over 3GB of ram. At this point my pc goes thrashing and I must kill tshark.
> >> That's not what I expected. I expected the memory to grow up to a certain size, then stop, feeding the output file.
> >> Any idea about what happens? Any suggestion on how to debug it?
> 
> On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 02:40:07PM +0000, Anders Broman wrote:
> 
> > No it will not; as state and stuff accumulates memory grows until *shark runs out of memory your mileage on
> 
> Isn't it a bug? Do we need some special option for such case, or reusing
> single pass tshark is good enough?
> We should anyway do -2 pass default where we have a file (and not pipe).

IMO it's a bug. While we need to keep a lot of state for Wireshark, we don't need
(most of) it for tshark.

 Ciao
      Jörg

-- 
Joerg Mayer                                           <jmayer@xxxxxxxxx>
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that
works. Some say that should read Microsoft instead of technology.