Wireshark mailing list archives

Re: Tips regarding measuring function execution times


From: Roland Knall <rknall () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2017 08:54:20 +0200

Please keep in mind, that those are not very precise. High-resolution timer
measurements cannot be done in a precise fashion on most windows systems
for ethernet applications. You would need to take the time immediately in
the MAC receiving the packet, everything above is already adding delays in
the time measurement. For exact that reason, most equipment for error
analysis in Industrial Ethernet systems (which rely heavily on precise
nano- and microsecond timestamps) use external (FPGA-based) hardware to
create the trace and 3rd party utilities to provide them to Wireshark.

In other words, microseconds is as reliable as it gets.

On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 8:34 AM, Paul Offord <Paul.Offord () advance7 com>
wrote:

Hi Roland,



I’m only doing this for debugging purposes, and I accumulate the total
time as each packet is dissected.  To get the value as output I’ve put the
printf in a cleanup routine that gets triggered when I close the trace file.



Unfortunately, microsecond granularity is not going to do it.  All start
and end times produced by the code below are equal – giving an elapsed time
of zero.  I’ve been looking at Windows nanosecond timers but I’ll have to
use C++ to get access to those.



Best regards….Paul



*From:* Wireshark-dev [mailto:wireshark-dev-bounces () wireshark org] *On
Behalf Of *Roland Knall
*Sent:* 16 October 2017 05:38

*To:* Developer support list for Wireshark <wireshark-dev () wireshark org>
*Subject:* Re: [Wireshark-dev] Tips regarding measuring function
execution times



Keep in mind, that printf is by far one of the slowest functions.
Additionally it slows also down the output as well. I'd recommend writing
the times into a buffer and dumping them in intervalls, very much like the
tap's work, otherwise what you see might not be what is happening on the
network.



cheers



On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 11:15 PM, Paul Offord <Paul.Offord () advance7 com>
wrote:

Thanks to all for the tips.  I’ll give it a go.



*From:* Wireshark-dev [mailto:wireshark-dev-bounces () wireshark org] *On
Behalf Of *Pascal Quantin
*Sent:* 15 October 2017 21:50
*To:* Developer support list for Wireshark <wireshark-dev () wireshark org>
*Subject:* Re: [Wireshark-dev] Tips regarding measuring function
execution times







2017-10-15 22:40 GMT+02:00 João Valverde <joao.valverde () tecnico ulisboa pt
:



On 15-10-2017 21:32, Peter Wu wrote:

On Sat, Oct 14, 2017 at 02:18:39PM +0000, Paul Offord wrote:

I'm investigating a performance problem with the TRANSUM dissector.  I'd
like to measure the accumulated time taken to execute a function in a
Release build.  My basic idea is to do something like this:

guint32 execute_time_us;
.
.
start_stopwatch(&execute_time_us);
function_call_to_be_measured();
pause_stopwatch(&execute_time_us);

.
.
.

stop_and_output_stopwatch(&execute_time_us);

Is there a standard way to do this in Wireshark?  How can I output the
accumulated time on, say, the Status Line?


Not sure about the Status line question, but you can measure elapsed
microseconds with something like:

     guint64 start_time, end_time;

     start_time = g_get_monotonic_time();
     // ...
     end_time = g_get_monotonic_time();
     // ...
     g_print("elapsed us: %" G_GUINT64_FORMAT, end_time - start_time);

https://developer.gnome.org/glib/stable/glib-Date-and-
Time-Functions.html#g-get-monotonic-time


I think console output doesn't work on Windows for graphical applications,
or something like that. There isn't a better standard mechanism for debug
output in Wireshark, that I know of.



You can make it appear with Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> change
gui.console_open option to ALWAYS.



Pascal.


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contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any
errors or omissions in the contents of this message, which arise as a
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