[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 21, 2004, at 9:13 AM, Biot Olivier wrote:

> Ethereal or tethereal continuously writes the captured packets to file 
> (it
> does *not* capture all packets to memory first until you stop 
> capturing).

...although it doesn't necessarily write a packet to the file as soon 
as it's received - the C I/O library routines it uses probably buffer 
data written to the file, so it'll typically write to the file in 4KB 
to 8KB units.