Mhonarc still use far too much memory on the big (~ 11Mb) mailboxes. I had
an idea: What if we didnt convertet attachments for the big mailboxes, just
made them disapear into /dev/null? :) Maybe that would make mhonarc use
less memory. I have looked for a -nomime option, but havnt found a way to
tell mhonarc not to process attachments.
Attachments take no memory (except the name of the file). If an
attachment is writting to a file, MHonArc does not keep it memory, only
only a filename of it.
Note, a process may never shrink size. For example, if there is a
large attachment, a big chunk of memory is allocated to process it.
Once dumped to disk and MHonArc does not deal with it anymore, the
process space may stay the same even though memory has been freed up.
I believe some operating systems will still keep allocated pages for a
process to avoid the expense of reallocation when a process requests
memory again. I am sure others can give more details about the
workings of (Unix) operating systems since I have not studied operating
systems since college.
There is definitely room for improvement in MHonArc's liberal use
of memory. Something to consider when I do the Perl 5 rewrite.
--ewh
