Huge thanks to our Platinum Members Endace and LiveAction,
and our Silver Member Veeam, for supporting the Wireshark Foundation and project.

Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Setting to disable all expert info

From: "Sultan, Hassan" <sultah@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2017 20:00:37 +0000
Here's my scenario :

I am planning on using the Wireshark parsing engine in two ways :
1) process massively large captures
2) process live traffic, hopefully in the long term in a permanent manner once the memory growth of the engine can be controlled

In both cases, my automation does not care about any experts at all, it only needs the field information (length/offset/name/hierarchy/encoding...) so these experts are consuming memory for nothing in our case.

As Wireshark evolves, new dissectors get added, which might add new experts, and not having a global setting to turn them off would force us to repeatedly search for new experts appearing, which is not a great experience.

Now granted, I haven't done measurements on how much memory they consume, the current experts might not represent much, but it's hard to judge when experts can appear in any new dissector, one could appear tomorrow that significantly alters that.

Thanks,

Hassan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wireshark-dev [mailto:wireshark-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
> Of Jaap Keuter
> Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2017 11:59 AM
> To: Sultan, Hassan via Wireshark-dev <wireshark-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Setting to disable all expert info
> 
> Are we going to be picking off features one by one to get the memory footprint
> down? Then I see a long list of preference settings growing from this. Not
> something I look forward to.
> 
> 
> On 02-08-17 20:43, Sultan, Hassan via Wireshark-dev wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> >
> >
> > Am I right in my understanding that there is no global way of
> > disabling insertion of expert information ?
> >
> >
> >
> > Assuming I’m correct, would anyone object to me adding that setting ?
> > That would be another way of lowering memory footprint.
> >
> >
> >
> > Thx,
> >
> >
> >
> > Hassan
> >
> >
> _________________________________________________________________
> __________
> Sent via:    Wireshark-dev mailing list <wireshark-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Archives:    https://www.wireshark.org/lists/wireshark-dev
> Unsubscribe: https://www.wireshark.org/mailman/options/wireshark-dev
>              mailto:wireshark-dev-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe