Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Using treads for init routines at startup?

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 11:30:40 -0700

On Sep 1, 2009, at 2:11 AM, Anders Broman wrote:
Could startup of Wireshark be speeded up by using treads for the init routines in epan_init()?

If you mean "by running multiple init routines in parallel on a multi- core machine", then it should be possible to run multiple protocol init routines in parallel (assuming that any Wireshark core data structures they modify are thread-safe), and, once they're all done, it should be possible to run the handoff routines in parallel (with the same caveat).

Finding the right number of threads would be platform-dependent; more threads than cores, on non-multi-threaded processors, might not be useful - I don't know what the right thing to do on multi-threaded processors would be.