Loads of WiFi Networks in Network Manager · patrick dot wagstrom dot net

This week was what is becoming my annual pilgrimage to Santa Clara, California for EclipseCon. Last year during the conference I took CalTrain from Mountain View to San Francisco to have dinner with Kenneth. It was there that I noted that NetworkManager unceremoniously crashed my laptop when it was exposed to the hundreds of networks visible on a mid-speed train barreling through the Valley.

This year I repeated the experiment and found that NetworkManager never crashed. Here’s a little bit of proof in the form of a screenshot that shows just a small fraction of the number of available networks. This was taken sometime earlier in the trip – there were only about 75 networks in the scroll view at this point. At some points there were well over 300 networks in the scroll view.

It wasn't completely 100% yet. There still was the tiny little issue of a very slow and non-responsive user interface when activating NetworkManager, but it's certainly a good start to see it can handle so many networks. Perhaps next year I'll try and see how it handles multiple network cards during the trip.