Dear ITI,

Is there any way to use the capture app to only keep a small amount of the most recent data for a very long capture?

The problem is, usually I run a test that can take many hours or days until it fails, and all I am interested in is the last few transactions. As you may know, the app is not well-behaved for captures longer than 1 or 2 minutes (at least on my host).

Another thing I think is sorely needed for this usage pattern is a way to tell the app to synchronously load all of the trace data. Once I had to wait 30 minutes for it to load the whole trace so I could see the end, and it was difficult to even know when it was done loading.

Other than these issues, I find my 1480A quite useful and I have used it to debug several problems in our product.

Thanks,
Monte

The challenge with only displaying the end of the data is that we must parse through the whole trace from the beginning in order to correctly determine the hierarchical information in the trace. This question has come up in the past and we have this on our TODO-list. In order to only save the very last of the trace we would have to essentially parse the file starting at an arbitrary location and then "guess" where the start of significant information is. Such significant information could be a token packet (IN, OUT, SETUP, SOF, PING) but since these packets could occur both at the top-level as well as deeper in the hierarchy (such as inside Device Requests) the initial displayed data could be incorrect. Perhaps the best solution could be to stream data to file without loading it into the application. Once the capture is done (days if needed) a special application could be run that extracts the relevant information from the capture file. This extracted data could then be loaded into the 1480A application.

Regarding loading of the data; all data is streamed from the source that could be the hardware or from a file). Both data sources work the same way so there's no easy way to know how far along the parsing is. We have, on our TODO-list, a task to put in a progress bar when reading data from file (since we in this case know the full data length).

We will look into these issues and see what can be done. Thanks for the feedback.