[Mailman-Users] Mailman Borks on Large Attachments

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Feb 5, 2008, at 6:23 AM, Lachlan Michael wrote:

> Now to just work out the root cause of the memory errors ...

It's important to remember that Python's email parsing code sucks the  
entire message text into memory and keeps large attachments in memory  
after parsing too.  There could be a number of problems associated  
with this, including a memory leak that causes the raw text to be kept  
even after parsing, or that the attachment is just to big to be kept  
in memory after parsing.

There have been talks over the years about how to modify the email  
package's api's so that it would be possible to store large  
attachments in a separate file outside of core memory, but this has  
yet to be done.  Now would be a good time to look into it again, if we  
have any hopes of getting something like this into Python 2.6 and  
3.0.  However, this isn't the right place to discuss such changes --  
those should happen on Python's email sig: http://www.python.org/sigs/email-sig

Cheers,
- -Barry

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