Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Ethereal 0.8.16 crashes opening large capture file

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 01:46:41 -0800
On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 12:56:29PM -0800, Sean Mathias wrote:
> I am capturing from a Gigabit card and creating new capture files hourly.
> When I try to open a capture file (500Mb) in Ethereal, it crashes and exits.
> 
> The system is a PIII-800, 1Gb RAM and 25Gb free disk space for captures.  
> 
> Has anyone else tried to open or work with files as large as this
> successfully?

Possibly, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that nobody has.  Ethereal
currently uses a GtkClist to display the list of packets, and a GtkCList
allocates a string for *every single column* of *every single row* in
that list - and, with a 500MB capture file, that's probably going to be
a *lot* of rows.  That's going to consume rather a lot of memory, I
suspect.

This will probably change eventually, but there's still a fair bit of
work to be done before it's ready.