Mutt stops showing mail contents

[Felix Finch]

On 20201218, Josef Wolf wrote:
>On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 07:39:05AM -0800, Felix Finch wrote:
>No idea what would be too much. Currently, there are about 7300 messages in my
>inbox and ps(1) reports this:
>
>  raven:/ # ps axl|grep -v grep |egrep  ' (mutt|COMMAND)'
>  F   UID   PID  PPID PRI  NI    VSZ   RSS WCHAN  STAT TTY        TIME COMMAND
>  0  1000  1135 19716  20   0  97188 21104 SyS_po S+   pts/3      0:00 mutt
>  0  1000 15559  6391  20   0  97260 21124 -      S    pts/2      0:00 mutt
>  raven:/ #
>
>but currently, the problem does not appear. I'll have to wait until it happens
>again.

I think it's a long shot, but maybe mutt has a memory leak and the size of your mail dirs overloads it eventually.

Long ago, when computers were slower, my maildirs got big enough to notice how slowly an open or search took, so I created an Archive dir and have a nightly cron job which moves older messages from the main maildirs to the Archive.  My biggest is 14G, but mutt took less than 5 seconds to open it, and the memory footprint isn't much different.

$ ps axl|grep -v grep |egrep  ' (mutt|COMMAND)'
F   UID   PID  PPID PRI  NI    VSZ   RSS WCHAN  STAT TTY        TIME COMMAND
0  1000 13476 13475  20   0  99364 11252 wait   S+   pts/1      4:20 mutt
0  1000 25739 25738  20   0 184164 104184 poll_s S+  pts/7      0:03 mutt

The first one is the normal long-term mutt, the second is the one I just fired up for the 14G Archive.

-- 
            ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._.
     Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & wood chipper / felix at crowfix.com
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I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o