Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Problems dissecting large amounts of data

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sep 26, 2006, at 11:42 AM, Brian Vandenberg wrote:

>   The window that I mentioned, showing progress of processed packet
> data, that window appears twice.  Is this a redundancy that could be
> eliminated?

In some cases, probably.  See below.


> :- First, clicking the initial packet caused the 'Processing packet
> data' window to appear twice.
> :- Opening my dissector's tree caused the same thing to happen
> :- Clicking line items in my tree, or opening subtrees would cause the
> 'processing' window to appear twice, then a very long delay I normally
> don't wait for (waited 10 min once before giving up).

Whenever you select an item in the packet detail pane, the text widget  
with the hex/ASCII dump has to highlight the data corresponding to  
it.  Unfortunately, that's currently done by *reconstructing the  
entire dump pane*, which is *another* thing that would probably be  
done better by a "virtual" widget of the type I describe - such a  
widget would highlight text when it draws it, so the time to redraw  
would be proportional to the amount of text *displayed*, not the total  
amount of text in the widget.

There are probably also extra calls to construct the dump pane being  
made.