[Jochen Friedrich <jochen@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Juergen,

> Jochen> ...except that it takes significantly *more* time with libsmi
> Jochen> than with UCD SNMP; perhaps that's just because there are
> Jochen> fewer MIBs that come with UCD SNMP, but, on my 450 MHz
> Jochen> PII/128MB memory machine, it takes several seconds longer for
> Jochen> an Ethereal linked against libsmi to start up than it takes
> Jochen> for an Ethereal linked against UCD SNMP to start up (even
> Jochen> after all the pages of the executable and the MIB files are
> Jochen> cached in memory after having run both programs once).
> 
> Jochen> Any comments on this concerns from your side?
> 
> Loading all IETF MIBs during startup is costly and usually not
> necessary. I think the default MIB set that people really need is
> pretty small and the loading time at startup should be mostly
> irrelevant. I guess that the UCD parser will also take significantly
> more time if you feed all the ~ 6.5 MB of IETF MIB definitions into
> it.

Unfortunately, when doing network traces, you don't know in advance which
MIBs you need. What would be needed is an OID to MIB kind of resolver.

The same is true for network management applications when decoding the
result of a sysObjectID query or a SNMP walk operation.

Cheers,
Jochen