Jim Donovan wrote: > Hi, > > We run a webmail system which was written in Mason. It won't let you download > or read large attachments (~5MB upwards). This seems to be some sort of > memory allocation error. > > If you watch the server with top(1) while downloading a 2MB attachment, you > can see the memory usage climb quickly to 45MB. With larger attachments, > growth is ppresumably even faster and some limit is passed, crashing httpd. > > Does anyone know what is happening and how to control it, please? > This is happening when you're serving a file that's encoded into an email down to a logged in webmail user? That just sounds like bad code to me or something. mod_perl doesn't do anything on it's own that would justify that kind of memory usage just serving a file. I could see how it'd be easy to chew up RAM if you're reading a MIME encoded attachment into a scalar, then converting it to binary, then serving it back to the client though.
Adam
