["Guy Harris" <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

JS wrote:
> How do I see what the minimal available bufferspace
> for a trace is?

What do you mean by "available buffer space"?

When capturing, Ethereal doesn't store packets in memory in a buffer, with
the buffer wrapping around or overflowing when it's full; it writes
packets to a file as it captures, and the file can be up to 2GB in size
(perhaps larger on platforms with 64-bit longs), if you have enough disk
space.

The capture mechanism used by libpcap/WinPcap (the libraries Ethereal uses
on UN*X and Windows to capture packets) might have some buffer space to
handle packets arriving before the application can read the next packet;
the size of that buffer space depends on the OS (and the version of the
OS).