On Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:40:52 -0700, Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.com> wrote:
Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
So you're really just worried about space consumption. I'd like to see a lot of hard memory profiling data before I got overly worried about that.
While I've seen some big Web pages, I think the email folks, who often have to process messages with attachments measuring in the tens of megabytes, have the stronger problems here, and I think speed may be more important than memory. I've built both a Web server and an IMAP server in Python, and the IMAP server is where the issues of storage management really prevail. If you have to convert a 20 MB encoded string into a Unicode string just to look at the headers as strings, you have issues. (The Python email package doesn't do that, by the way.)
Unfortunately in the current Python3 email package (email5), this is no longer true. You have to decode everything *first* in order to pass it through email (which presents a few problems when dealing with 8bit data, as has been mentioned here before). eamil6 intends to fix this, and once again allow you to decode to text only the bits you actually need to access and manipulate. -- R. David Murray www.bitdance.com