Very important: there’s also a “Seconds Since Previous Captured Packet”, which seems to show the same values in most cases – until you apply a filter that hides the previous packet. It’s also called “Delta Time Displayed”, because it doesn’t add up like the “Relative Time” does – it shows measurements between two packets, no more, no less. Seconds Since Previous Displayed Packet – this will tell you the time elapsed between the current packet and it’s predecessor.when timing a TCP handshake to determine Initial Round Trip Time But in combination with the option to set arbitrary starting points (called “Time Reference” points) this can be quite useful, e.g.

Oftentimes this format doesn’t seem too useful unless you want to know how much time passed from the start of the capture. This is also called “Relative Time” in many cases, because the values are relative to the point of origin, which is the beginning of the first packet by default. Seconds Since Beginning of Capture – you can think of this like a stop watch running during the capture and writing down the exact time for and when each packet is captured.In general, there’s three formats that are mostly used: Right? Well… sometimes (this is a question for a “it depends” answer), because there is a menu option in the “View” menu that allows you to configure what the column actually shows:Īs you can see, this column can display various time values for a packet. It looks simple at first: it displays the time since the beginning of the capture. This is the column of the default set we need to look at in great detail. The reason why the correct order of packets is important is quite simple: the Wireshark TCP expert module processes packets in order of arrival, so if you can’t reconstruct the packet order you might get confused why it flags a packet as retransmission or out-of-order. when you have out-of-order arrivals on the capture cards.

If you think you can also achieve this by a relative or absolute time column as well, you’d be correct for most cases, but not all, e.g.

It’s the only reliable way to sort all packets back to the order of how they were captured.

First of all it’s a good idea to be able to reference packets by their number if you’re discussing your findings.

The “No.” column shows a running number counting packets, from 1 up. Let’s walk through the standard columns in Wireshark and explain what they are doing and why you might want to keep them: No. Figure 1 – Wireshark Columns in the top pane

Wireshark filter http session