[Ed Warnicke <hagbard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ethereal currently has a limitation in its usefulness in that it grows 
roughly linearly in memory usage with the size of the capture.

I've got situations where I would like to be able to run several 
gigabytes worth of capture and analyze them with ethereal, but 
I cannot because of the memory consumption.  Linux is very unpleasant when 
it runs out of memory.

I realize the current choice in how ethereal deals with memory is 
a trade off between the cpu and memory in which cpu cycles are deamed 
scarcer than memory, but this is not always the case.

Is there anyone else interested in looking at what it would take to 
allow ethereal to function efficiently within a memory budget for 
very large captures?  

Ed