Re: [ethereal-dev] Ethereal taking a long time on my Laptop

[guy@xxxxxxxxxx (Guy Harris)]

> I find that Ehereal is taking a very long time to decode packets on my laptop.
> 
> My laptop is only a 166MHz Pentium, but top does not show ethereal up at
> all during the decode phase, so something wierd is going on. I was going to
> try to use gprof, but find that I don't know how to do it :-(
> 
> Anyone got any hints?

It *might* be taking a long time to translate IP addresses to host
names, or something such as that, waiting for a DNS server or whatever
to respond, if it's not consuming a lot of CPU time.  See whether it's
faster if you run it with the "-n" flag.  (At least Ethereal caches DNS
lookup failures, including timeouts, so it won't *repeatedly* try to
look up the same IP address....)