At 06:39 PM 6/4/99 +0000, Bennett Todd wrote:
Procmail reads the entire message to be processed into memory. If you don't
want a sufficiently huge message to hang your system --- one bigger than
available virtual memory, typically RAM + swap - system overhead --- then you
have only two choices: limit message size in your MTA, or switch to something
other than procmail.
I've taken the first of these approaches -- grudgingly. (I'm sure we'll get
complaints from users.) I've also thought about enlarging the swap space, but
there's no utility that's equivalent to PowerQuest's PartitionMagic for UNIX
disk slices! To redo the disk label, I'd have to do a backup,
wipe the disk, change the amount of space allocated for each partition, and
restore. Besides, a swap partition that's 4x the amount of RAM on the system
is usually plenty.
Most programs don't try to hold everything in RAM; they keep large chunks of
data (especially when it's accessed serially) in a file. Maybe Procmail should
do this.
--Brett Glass