Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Performance. Ethereal is slow when usinglargecaptures.
On Sun, 16 Nov 2003, Ronnie Sahlberg wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Biot Olivier"
> Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 12:50 PM
> Subject: RE: [Ethereal-dev] Performance. Ethereal is slow when
> usinglargecaptures.
>
>
> > A second performance increase proposal I had in mind is to use hash lookup
> > instead of sequential lookup for large value_string tables. Part of this
> can
> > be done with #define's (where either the existing linear lookup or the the
> > yet-to-define hash lookup can be chosen), and the remaining part can be
> > produced with scripts (similar to makeregdotc). But if we're eliminating
> the
> > number of (re)dissection passes this may not be relevant anymore...
>
> Excellent suggestion.
Can I suggest that we only change those things that gprof indicates are a
problem?
> Both SMB and DCE have value strings for the response code that are huge.
> Both of these protocols are very common.
> But there are also a lot of (the majority) value_strings that only contain a
> small number of entries.
>
> We could do something like
>
> create :
> struct val_string {
> int num_items; /*initially set to 0 */
> bin_tree *tree; /* binary tree holding value and string values */
> value_string /* the original value string tree */
> }
>
> Then we could create alternate functions to access the val_string that are
> functionally equivalent to the ones accessing value_string.
> Lots of work but will probably be worth it.
>
> Each time val_to_string() is called we also do :
> if(val_string->num_items==0){ /* we have not converted this one yet */
> val_string->num_items=count_num_items_in(val_string->value_string);
> if(val_string->num_items>8){ /* only create the tree if it holds >8
> (arbitrary value) items, if less items its probably not worth it */
>
> val_string->tree=create_a_binary_tree_of_all_value_string_values(val_string-
> >value_string); /* make sure the tree is perfectly balanced */
> }
> }
> if(val_string->tree){ /* do we have a quick access tree or not ? */
> look_it_up_in_the_tree();
> } else {
> do_the_normal_lookup_walking_value_string_sequentially();
> }
>
>
> We do our own binary tree handler. We dont have to worry about
> inserting/removing values or deleting the tree since it will never change.
> We only implement an optimized function to build a tree given a value_string
> and to look up a value in the tree.
>
>
> Then we just convert all the value_string declarations one by one into
> val_string declarations.
>
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>
--
Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]ns.aus.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org,
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com
