#2319 new
Dmitry

Excessive memory usage

Reported by Dmitry | May 13th, 2019 @ 09:05 PM

Hello benny,

I noticed, lately, that MailMate is consuming an inordinate ammount of memory. Granted, my archive goes back ot 2011, but it's never been this slow. Currently it's sitting at 3.4 gigs. What can I do?

https://imgur.com/a/d8TJYp4

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • Dmitry

    Dmitry May 28th, 2019 @ 04:58 PM

    I have now attempted a couple of things to get this issue to go away to no avail:

    • removed all internet accounts and recreated them.
    • removed /Users/dmitry/Library/Application Support/MailMate

    The last step removed all my preferences and filters, which was very inconvenient.

    At this point I have 65,000 messages in MailMate. Is that a lot? I dont know. The memory usage has not gone down. My 16gig macbook pro (late 2016, i7) is affected to such an extent that there's delay with keystrokes appearing on screen.

    I'd love to hear something else I can try. Mailmate is wonderful in enabling my email workflow, but it's coming ot a point where using it is very frustrating.

  • Joseph Hannon

    Joseph Hannon June 10th, 2019 @ 05:03 PM

    I've been using MailMate (MM) with SpamSieve for a few years now and really like a lot of what I can do with it- primarily the conditions logic for smart mailboxes. I've also noticed excessive memory usage and have not found an effective way to reduce it. I have a similar setup to Dmitry, except I have roughly 450 K messages. Just restarted MM and the memory usage is 1.76 Gb. I also notice when MM has been running for the day and I return to it (click) to check an email, that's when it goes through processing requiring me to wait for one minute or so to see the result.

    I've run MM from the Mac Terminal to see log messages. Seems the hang times are rolling through the smart mailboxes conditions doing some type of processing. I use a lot of "address contains" type logic. I did not see posts where Benny says contains is an inefficient query.

    I found that MM writes emails to my drive as .eml files which is great. What is not great is MM pulling in all of their headers and storing those into memory for fast searching, no matter what I do. I did wipe out all smart mailboxes to see if that would prevent the headers load. No joy. I'm not privied to the design decisions that went into MM, but the first thing I'm considering is to use a modern database in which to store .eml headers and tune the database do it's thing such that the mail app won't consume a big chunk of memory or other resources.

    I'm really looking for a MM type app/setup but one that is less resource intensive than what MM is now. I'm ok with an app that uses resources to do some work and then releases them. MM is staying near 2 Gb memory usage when idle.

    I've seen suggestions around using systems that do use databases for just such a purpose, such as mailsteward. As I'm a developer, I may roll my own solution if I'm not able to find a way to reduce MM memory usage, or mailsteward (or equivalent) will not do the job. If I go this route, I will consider using Mac Mail to get my mail, integrate with SpamSieve, then a custom app to show smart mailboxes, subjects, and the .eml header. If I need to open an email, respond, etc, then it will open in Mail. I've got a big work load now, so am not looking to add a mail client solution to the load.

    I welcome suggestions to help remedy what I've described. I like MM but will need it to stop consuming so many resources.

  • Dmitry

    Dmitry June 11th, 2019 @ 12:35 AM

    Joseph, I have significantly less email than you - only about 65k messages. I tried a blank configuration (no smart mailboxes for example, see my previous message) and it didn't seem to help.

    At this point in time, I've abandoned MailMate. It's served me well for a couple of years but now it's basically frustratingly unusable. Depending on your comfort wtih terminal, etc notmuch on emacs might be a good option. It's the one I'm experimenting on. It fast, flexible but the guts are exposed.

    https://bostonenginerd.com/posts/notmuch-of-a-mail-setup-part-1-mbs...
    https://bostonenginerd.com/posts/notmuch-of-a-mail-setup-part-2-not...

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Mac OS X email client.

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