1 | initial version |
Welcome to the wonderful internals of packet-capturing. When you use Wireshark to capture, the libpcap (or WinPcap/Npcap on windows) is used to read the packets, timestamp them and write them to disk. This means the following things occur in order (this is my interpretation of the internal process to explain your finding, it might not be 100% correct):
As there is some time between step 1 and step 4, there is a big chance some more packets arrived in the mean time. Once libpcap gets to read the packets and timestamp them, it has no knowledge about the times the packets were actually received, it can only use the current time as the timestamp for each packet, and therefor the real delta time between the packets is lost and the timestamps in the pcap file are just an approximation.
If you need more accurate timestamps, you will need to use a network card or external device that is specifically made for packet capturing and has the ability to timestamp the packet as soon as it is received.