Wireshark-users: [Wireshark-users] Severe UI degradation in 1.10.5

From: Stuart MacDonald <stuartm.coding@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2014 09:53:49 -0500
I upgraded to 1.10.5 a little while ago and noticed some severe UI issues. I downgraded to 1.10.4 last night, and this morning all seems to be well again, so it looks like a problem in 1.10.5.

My use case is that I'm debugging an svn issue which involves running a lengthy capture (400k - 500k packets) of which about 80-90% are a single TCP connection between the svn client and server.

In 1.10.5 the UI is no longer responsive.

Scrolling during a live capture doesn't scroll. It scrolls a few packets and then sits and doesn't do any updating. Eventually it "catches up": long after the capture is stopped, it restarts scrolling and goes until it reaches the bottom of the packet list.

I see similar behaviour when opening an existing capture: the processing dialog freezes at 10% say, something low, and sits there doing nothing for ages. Eventually it will finish but it takes a long time.

Hitting the cancel button when either of these situations is occurring doesn't do anything immediately. Eventually it takes effect but it's minutes later.

Exporting the packets, both the full buffer and just the followed TCP connection takes ages as well.

I'm willing to test/run debug versions/etc.

I just finished the test run with 1.10.4, and the performace is markedly better.

I'm going to guess that a dissector is hogging the main thread, starving out the UI.

...Stu