Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] which Operating System for Wireshark ? bestperformance
...And, like Ronnie implied, the secret to reasonable Wireshark performance on Windows is making sure that you never, ever, have to do disk swapping. There's something about Wireshark/glib/gtk/<other> memory management that really doesn't play well with Windows paging, at least when the Windows pagefile is involved...Especially when the Wireshark process itself has pages both being swapped to and from disk. Once you start disk swapping, go take a nap and come back later. Hopefully you weren't trying to capture data, because it's all been dropped.
