Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] RFD: New language to write dissectors

From: Jeff Morriss <jeff.morriss.ws@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2012 10:30:35 -0400
Jakub Zawadzki wrote:
From my perspective: I really use ~ 20 dissectors, why I need all of them?

Admittedly 99% of the time I normally only use 10-15 dissectors, but OTOH every once in a while I'll start Wireshark to figure out why my <insert service/application here> is <slow, not working, whatever> and it's nice that my Wireshark automatically decodes <service/application>'s traffic.

Anyway, what does it matter to me if there are 20 dissectors or 1000? Wireshark's startup time is still fairly fast[1]. Could it be faster? Sure, why not. Do I care? Not as much as making dissecting and filtering faster.

[1] On my *old* desktop it takes ~1.5 seconds between when I start the GUI though (manually) hitting Ctrl-Q and when the process exits. (Admittedly I probably ran it recently so most of the pages are in memory already.)