[Pan-users] Resources

[Mike Erickson]

This is going to be a somewhat annoyingly vague complaint, but it seems
that pan takes up way more memory and CPU than is necessary.

I currently run pan on a p2-400 machine with ~400MB of ram.

Today, I was browsing a newsgroup that had ~400K headers. Downloading
them and loading them up took forever, but I'm willing to accept that,
as it's collating the binary attachments (of which there were many),
etc.

However, I went back to the Groups view (tabbed setup), and marked all
articles read. My box now ran out of memory, started swapping to disk,
and was unusable for nearly 30 minutes.

The memory footprint reported by top(1) was ~240MB and remained that big
even after it finished marking the messages read. It was still very
unresponsive (the application itself), so I had to close and restart,
where the memory footprint dropped back down to ~33MB.

So, is this normal? Is there anything I can do to optimize pan for large
newsgroup handling? Anyone know of a better tool for this sort of
somewhat specialized use?

Other factors that might come into play, but I doubt it:
I'm exporting pan via X11 to my XP desktop
I was also downloading some other attachments simultaneously

Mike
Pan 0.14.0 (gtk2)
FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE