On Apr 25, 2016, at 4:59 PM, Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> When I read the capture file mentioned in bug 12367
>
> https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12367
>
> it eats about 6-8GB on my machine.
>
> A large amount of that data is in structures allocated by init_tcp_conversation_data(), which is called by get_tcp_conversation_data() if there isn't already one for the conversation.
>
> get_tcp_conversation_data() is *always* called by dissect_tcp(), so you can't disable that analysis.
>
> So if you're reading a large capture file with a lot of TCP connections, make sure you're on a 64-bit machine that has plenty of memory and that either has or can allocate plenty of swap space to back it if necessary.
(Note: the crash on OS X isn't a "I ran out of memory so I'm calling abort()" crash; *maybe* it's running out of memory on Windows, given the "the application requested" message from Windows, but, if so, there's a separate problem on OS X.)