Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Redesign of the WHOLE Ethereal main menu

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 02:17:29PM -0800, Blue Boar wrote:
> Ronnie Sahlberg wrote:
> > a capture->stop item sounds useful.
> > But the stop button should still remain in the capture dialog.
> > During the capture the main window is "unresponsive" and will not react to
> > any user input.
> 
> Ah, so maybe there's a non-cosmetic reason for it to be a seperate window, 
> then?  There's something in the gtk that allows a seperate window to be 
> responsive, and not a section of the main window?  I'm asking, I know 
> nothing about this gtk.

It *might* be possible to make the main window responsive even in a
non-"Update list of packets in real time" capture.  We might find stuff
that has to be handled specially, however, when a non-"Update list of
packets in real time" capture is in progress, as there's no active
capture file *and* it's not clear that it makes sense to allow one to be
read in at that point (as, when the in-progress capture is stopped, that
capture will be read in).

> Is it safe to assume that if you had auto-scroll on when you started, then 
> the ability to turn it off on the fly would improve performance in that 
> circumstance?

Auto-scroll doesn't help, as it has to update the screen.

However, as Ronnie noted, given that "Update list of packets in real
time" captures read in the capture file as the capture is taking place,
so that it dissects each packet as it is captured, so even without
auto-scroll, it's not cheap.

So Ethereal can't have "Update list of packets in real time" always be on.