Re: Memory consumption in tshark

[Anders Broman <anders.broman () ericsson com>]

From: wireshark-dev-bounces () wireshark org [mailto:wireshark-dev-bounces () wireshark org] On Behalf Of Evan Huus
Sent: den 29 augusti 2013 15:21
To: Developer support list for Wireshark
Subject: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Memory consumption in tshark

On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 5:32 AM, Dario Lombardo <dario.lombardo.ml () gmail com<mailto:dario.lombardo.ml () gmail com>> 
wrote:
On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 3:45 PM, Evan Huus <eapache () gmail com<mailto:eapache () gmail com>> wrote:
Also, just as a useful reference point: if you run your normal tshark command (no valgrind) on the 1GB subset, what 
does memory usage of the process peak at?

It uses about 1,5GB of memory.

With the env vars you asked me to export, tshark can't run on the 1GB pcap file. I've reduced the dataset to 2 millions 
of pkts, and that's the output.

That's quite useful actually: it looks like the majority of the memory is being used to store address-resolution data 
from all of the DNS packets so that if those IP addresses show up later we can resolve them immediately (without having 
to ask the system name resolver).

It doesn't look like there's a way to disable this at the moment (I believe we still store the names even if name 
resolution is disabled), but it should be easy enough to fix. The add_ipv4_name and add_ipv6_name functions should 
probably be no-ops if all name resolution is disabled. Then simply passing the -n flag will greatly reduce your memory 
usage (though it won't yet).
If nobody has any objections or better ideas I will probably fix this on the weekend.
Cheers,
Evan

Currently also get_hostname() causes the IP to be added to the hash table presumably on the presumption it will be 
faster than doing ip_to_string().



___________________________________________________________________________
Sent via:    Wireshark-dev mailing list <wireshark-dev () wireshark org>
Archives:    http://www.wireshark.org/lists/wireshark-dev
Unsubscribe: https://wireshark.org/mailman/options/wireshark-dev
             mailto:wireshark-dev-request () wireshark org?subject=unsubscribe