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Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Timestamp Skew

From: Bill Meier <wmeier@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:31:53 -0500
Guy Harris wrote:
On Jan 14, 2010, at 10:19 AM, Lee Riemer wrote:

The sniffer server is syncing with NTP, and this is also a dual core system.  You may be on to something, though.  If the box is correcting it's skew with NTP, wireshark might not be if it isn't polling the time for each packet.

Anyone know exactly how WS picks the time to stamp?

On Windows, it takes it from the information supplied to it by WinPcap, so it's not Wireshark that's picking the time to stamp, it's WinPcap.  (On UN*X, it takes it from the information supplied to it by libpcap, which is, on almost all platforms, the time supplied to libpcap by the OS-native packet capture mechanism being used by libpcap.)

If none of the WinPcap developers reply here, you might want to report it to them as a bug:


A web search for "time drift" winpcap turns up some seemingly relevant info.....