[Bug 45633] Evolution eats up all system memory when recursing into imap directory tree.

Christian Reis kiko at async.com.br
Fri May 19 17:40:32 UTC 2006


Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: evolution

This is a bug that spans evolution, uw-imapd and the libc-client
library.

It happens when:

  a) /etc/c-client.cf does not specify a mail-subdirectory
  b) The user's subdirectory contains many files and directories (and symlinks). Our users who ran into this problem had something like 5000 files reported by a naïve "find ~user | wc -l".

Upon startup, Evolution will eat up all system memory when recursing
into the imap server's directory structure. It will start up fine, but
will slowly balloon until it takes up over 500MB of memory. These boxes
have no swap so evo blows up there, often bringing down the whole
system.

To fix this we should:

  a) Add some band-aid configuration and default policy to c-client/uw-imap
  b) Catch evolution before it decides to DOS the system while recursing madly into user subdirectories

The c-client.rc example included in libc-client discusses a list-
maximum-level option. It is said that the default is 20 and I honestly
don't see why it should be more than 5; I'm not sure this is helpful or
not but it is a hint.

** Affects: evolution (Ubuntu)
       Severity: Major
       Priority: (none set)
         Status: Unconfirmed
** Affects: uw-imap (Ubuntu)
       Severity: Normal
       Priority: (none set)
         Status: Unconfirmed

** Also affects: uw-imap (Ubuntu)
     Severity: Normal
     Priority: (none set)
       Status: Unconfirmed

-- 
Evolution eats up all system memory when recursing into imap directory tree.
https://launchpad.net/bugs/45633




More information about the universe-bugs mailing list