[Evolution-hackers] New memory analysis related to Camel

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

I have made a new memory report on tinymail. Because tinymail and
Evolution share a lot Camel code, I think the analysis is interesting
for the Evolution team too.

http://tinymail.org/trac/tinymail/wiki/MemoryStats

These are the structures of the CamelMessageInfoBase structure that
tinymail's Camel removes.

guint32 size;
CamelSummaryReferences *references;/* from parent to root */
struct _CamelFlag *user_flags;
struct _CamelTag *user_tags;

Tinymail of course also uses the mmap patch.

The references allocated accounted for 7% of all allocated memory usage.
The three others are on a i386 x86 machine 4 bytes each. I don't use the
size nor user_flags and user_tags properties of the summary items. So
I've cut them out.

Maybe a solution for Evolution would be load the references on demand to
reduce the size? Since I'm not yet supporting threaded sorting in
tinymail, and because I'm planning to implement support for this very
differently, I decided to cut it out.

I guess this is proof that Camel, with a few major adaptations, can be
used for environments where memory consumption ought to be low. I'm
planning to go even further and make more changes like these.

I'm now trying to figure out a less memory consuming solution for the
CamelMessageContentInfo structure (16% of all allocations are such
instances).

After that I will focus on the "getting new headers" problem of the mmap
patch once more.

I'm also playing with the idea of fully replacing the CamelFolderSummary
implementation with something that uses a sqlite or db2. That one is a
little bit a dilemma at this moment for me: it would probably start
looking like the disk summary concept, etc etc etc ...


ps. Feel free to ask me not to post reports like this on the evolution
hackers mailing list if you really feel that this has nothing to do with
evolution. Since both projects use Camel, I have a different opinion but
I wouldn't contest yours.

-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend 
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be 
http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be