Subject: ARGH! Memory usage in Pine 3.95

From: [email-masked] (Brian Miller)
Date: 19 Nov 1996 15:36:33 GMT

I posted a query a couple of weeks ago about this - dunno
if it ever made it out into the world...

I'm running Pine 3.95 on a P120 under BSDI 2.0.1 w/32M
memory and 200M of swap.  Not often (only about three
times a day...grrrr) Pine will die on me with an "Out of free
storage" error when attempting to access a mailbox
that's larger than approx. 6MB in size.  I find it hard
to believe that Pine is really starved for memory resources,
so I figure it must be something else.  Anyone have
any ideas?  Is Pine simply incapable of handling large
mailboxes?  Is there some build option I missed that would
allow me to use Pine (instead of emacs) to read the "other"
part of my mail?  I also had this problem under v3.91
that was bundled as part of BSDI; I was hoping that 3.95 
would fix the problem.

If there's no fix, anyone want to suggest an IMAP mail 
client that's capable of handling large mailboxes?

--------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Miller        www.cybercash.com       Resident Curiosity
[email-masked]	                   [email-masked]
One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom forth into hysteria.

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 11:07:15 -0800

Suggestion: consider using an alternative format for your mail, such as
tenex format.  Read the Pine technical note for more information.  We long
ago gave up on mbox format for big mailboxes.  Some of our people have
tenex format mailboxes in the tens of megabytes.

Do you know how many messages are in your mailbox and have a general idea
of the sizes of messages?  Long ago, Pine would allocate a single 6MB
buffer (ala emacs) for your 6MB mailbox.  The problem was with malloc() 
implementations that would round up the request to the nearest power of
two, thus 6MB would become 8MB.  Pine now allocates buffers for each
message.  The problem is that some malloc() implementations do poorly with
that technique.

We are considering using a scratch file instead of a memory buffer; the
problem with doing that is that users run up against disk quotas and it's
slower.

Also, have you checked your per-process memory limits ("limit" command),
in particular the "datasize" and "memoryuse" values?  I, too, find it
difficult to believe that you could pop memory on your system with just a
6MB mailbox. 

> client that's capable of handling large mailboxes?

-- Mark --	Read http://www.imap.org for the "best kept secret in email"

DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: (206) 685-4045  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39"
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.