[kdepim-users] Why is KMail so memory-hungry?

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Friday 18 December 2009, 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?

No, but it does load a small amount of data for each and every message 
in your mail store. This can sum up to a larger amount of memory. I 
don't know how the KDE 3 version compares to the KDE 4 version in this 
respect.

Also KMail doesn't handle messages with large attachments very 
efficiently.


> 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.

Alternatively, you could consider going back to Ubuntu 8.04.


> 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.

We hope that the situation will become much better once KMail has been 
ported to the new backend Akonadi.


Regards,
Ingo
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