[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> If ethereal were to start using COMPOSITEs this would greatly increase the
> emory footprint of ethereal

I.e., Ethereal uses so little memory that merely allocating a chunk of
memory to put the data behind *one* COMPOSITE tvbuff into a single
contiguous buffer will greatly increase Ethereal's memory footprint?

(Note that tvbuffs do not, and are not supposed to, live forever, and
when they're freed - which should happen as soon as Ethereal frees up
the "epan_dissect_t" for the frame it's dissecting, which should be
after it's done processing the protocol tree or after you select a
different frame - the allocated buffer will be freed; if it doesn't get
freed, that's a bug.

I.e., it's not the case that memory will fill up with those chunks of
memory.)