openwall / openwall/john

incorrect ETA after early skipped rules

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#5,049 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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bug
Dominant language
C
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Description

Running with --rules-skip-nop makes john jump over the : rule, which is commonly the first in a rule set, and this results in slightly incorrect progress percentage (starts at 0.07% with our new default rules) and in extremely incorrect ETA early on (says the job will complete almost instantly, then in days, then in months - when in reality it might not complete in years). Apparently, it appears to john that it can process a rule in almost zero time, and if so even once it's processed another rule (which can sometimes take a very long time) the speed estimate for ETA is still off by a factor of two.

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the progress and ETA behavior with --rules-skip-nop and the default rules described in the issue. Trace how skipped rules are counted and how rule-processing time feeds the progress and ETA display; done means the early estimates remain representative after skipped and long-running rules.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c
Domain
cli, performance
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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