[Pan-users] Pan has 8 Processes, using 1436MB! That's eating my RAM!

[Dr. Adrian Wrigley]

Hi guys!

I know this is covered in the FAQ and also in several older threads:
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/pan-users/2003-03/msg00039.html
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/pan-users/2002-05/msg00263.html
but it represents a serious unsolved problem to me.

I've only got 2048M of RAM installed, and another 2048M in swap,
so I'm having to be quite frugal with memory consumption [;-)]

I am running pan 0.14.0 on a dual Athlon box, with RedHat 7.3

I'm getting suspicious that there is a memory leak in one of the libraries,
since other (gtk) applications sometimes consume limitless memory too.

The Gtk guys are telling me that this is not a memory leak in Gtk
or Glib (their FAQ says they don't leak memory either).

Questions:

Does pan memory ever shrink?  Or can it only rise monotonically?

How can I set a maximum consumption, without killing the process?

Assuming I use text NGs and occasional light use of binaries,
roughly what is the absolute maximum pan should use (if correctly installed)?
(20MB? 200MB? 2000MB?)

Have any of the other people with this problem managed to solve it? How?

Sometimes my other programs need memory and the machine freezes for
a while shuffling swap.  Occasionally, processes get randomly killed off
by the kernel.  This is not acceptable to me.

Currently, the best solution I have found is to quit offending
programs on a regular basis, or when memory use is giving problems.

Thanks in advance for any ideas on this issue.
--
Adrian

PS: Please don't suggest buying more RAM - my mobo only takes 4096M :(

Here's what top says:

Mem:  2064908K av, 2053488K used,   11420K free,       0K shrd,    2160K buff
Swap: 2008084K av, 1719476K used,  288608K free                 1033772K cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
21433 amtw      15   0 1436M 218M 24664 S     0.1 10.8  14:13 pan
21451 amtw      15   0 1436M 218M 24664 S     0.0 10.8   0:03 pan
21452 amtw      15   0 1436M 218M 24664 S     0.0 10.8   0:05 pan
21453 amtw      15   0 1436M 218M 24664 S     0.0 10.8   0:05 pan
21454 amtw      15   0 1436M 218M 24664 S     0.0 10.8   0:05 pan
21455 amtw      15   0 1436M 218M 24664 S     0.0 10.8   0:05 pan
21456 amtw      15   0 1436M 218M 24664 S     0.0 10.8   0:04 pan
21457 amtw      15   0 1436M 218M 24664 S     0.0 10.8   0:05 pan