Sniffer® Portable Professional User's Guide - NetScout

Display Setup > General Options
Displaying Captured Data
The Display > Display Setup > General tab contains options that can
change the performance of Sniffer Portable Professional’s decodes when
working with large buffers or trace files.
In previous releases, when decoding a trace file or buffer, Sniffer
Portable Professional’s protocol interpreters would start by performing a
prescan of the entire trace or buffer. For large trace files and buffers, this
process could take a long time.
To address this issue, Sniffer Portable Professional provides the option
of a windowed approach. Using the windowed approach, Sniffer Portable
Professional starts by prescanning a user-specified portion of the trace
file or buffer. When moving from window to window within the buffer or
trace file, the previous prescanned information will be cleared from
memory so the new window can be scanned. This way, decoded
information is available more quickly.
You specify both whether to use the windowed approach and the size of
the window to be used in the Display > Display Setup > General tab.
Set the reassembly options as follows:
Reassemble entire trace file— Enable this option if you would
like to reassemble the entire trace file or buffer before displaying
decoded data. Disable this option if you would like to reassemble
the trace file in “chunks.”
Reassembly window size — Use this option to specify the size
(in terms of the number of frames) of the “chunk” to be
reassembled and displayed. As you move between chunks, one
chunk is cleared out and scan another is scanned.
The default and minimum value for the Reassembly window size
is 5000. This value is configurable, but it is recommended that you
edit this value only if it is absolutely necessary.
NOTE: When Frame Slicing is enabled on the Capture > Define
Filter > Buffer tab, windowed reassembly is not supported.
Enabling windowed reassembly and frame slicing can result in some
minor display problems.
User’s Guide 179