Re: Why is KMail so memory-hungry?

Hi Bill,

Yes, I have found the same problem. If my computer is very slow, in any app, I 
look at system monitor, and it is always KMail, either chewing up CPU or 
memory.

I use Ubuntu 9.04

It often crashes, especially after I do a search, and then looses all current 
flags (mail read, fowarded,etc).  Not real impressed with the memory management 
side of things.

Peter

On Friday 18 December 2009 23:53:20 bill purvis wrote:
> I've been using KMail for a few years now, and recently upgraded my
> OS (Ubuntu) to 9.10. Everything seems to have expanded and in particular
> KMail! My poor laptop is only 512MB of real memory and is spending most
> of its time thrashing stuff to swap-space. Does KMail load the whole
> of my admittedly large collection of old emails into memory?
>
> I've just spent the whole morning trying to respond to a few emails.
> I get long delays - 5 minutes is not unusual just moving a message
> from my inbox into another folder. I've just spent the past hour pursuading
> KMail to send someone an email - four times it crashed out saying that
> the smtp process had unexpectedly died. retrieve the message from the
> outbox, null edit, then send again. Eventually it has managed to send it.
>
> I do run a 'busy' machine with Firefox, Open Office, Apache, Mysql all
> running together, but they're all part of my normal work and it all worked
> fine under Ubuntu 8.04.
>
> I have been using 'top' to see what is going on, and see that KMail
> uses far more real memory than anything else - typical RSS=180m
> while other 'large' users are taking around 20m.
>
> I know that the solution is going to be - 'add more memory' but
> I feel that is a cop-out. I'm getting a new laptop for Christmas and
> that will get around the current state, but if things carry on expanding
> we'll all have to upgrade the hardware more often!
>
> Sorry if this just appears to be a long grumble, but I would appreciate
> some positive feedback on why KMail should be so demanding.
>
> Bill