[Bug 110574] Overly huge memory consumption with large attachments causes crashes

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110574         




------- Additional Comments From John laczik org  2007-04-03 15:22 -------
The runaway process is kio_imap4, it tries to grab memory until the system
starts to swap heavily and grinds to a halt. As a temporary fix I added
  ulimit -S -v [amount of system memory in kB]
  ulimit -S -m [0.8 x amount of system memory in kB]
to /etc/profile.d/limits.sh. With these settings KMail now at least bails
out gracefully without crashing; the e-mail still cannot be read though.
If you are using something other than Mandriva/bash, you may have to edit
different files.

P.S.
I do not consider 4MB a large attachment, and KMail should be able to deal
with it!

> When trying to load/preview an e-mail I recently received, which had more
> than ~30 attachments and was ~4MB in size, the system locked up completely
> after some initial disk activity. A system reset was then required.  I view
> this as critical - KMail must not bring the whole system down, even if the
> e-mail it receives is extremely large or complex.
>
> When trying to access the same e-mail on a different machine with more HW
> resources (but the same software setup), the system froze again for a few
> minutes with heavy disk activity, probably swapping, but then came back to
> life with the following message from KMail: 'Error while retrieving
> information on the structure of a message.' 'The process for the
> imap://imap228.herald.ox.ac.uk protocol died unexpectedly.'
>
> A different e-mail from the same sender, so probably sent from the same
> client and having the same internal structure, but only with 8 attachments
> and ~2MB size, did not cause any problems.