[pmmail-list] FIXED! [was Re: 5 minutes to open address book!]

[Andrew Webber]

On Wed, 01 May 2002 22:05:04 -0400, Andrew Webber wrote:

>Should I move to 2475 or stay where I am?  (The readme 
>on this 2360 is dated April 2001 so I haven't changed 
>anything recently, and it's worked since I installed it).
>
>(Interesting trivia, when I hit "reply" to Brandon's 
>message, it came up right away!  But PMMail is still 
>holding onto 243,268K of memory according to Task 
>manager).

Okay I've fixed it.  Here's how.  (It was Addr.db for those who
don't want to wade through this).

Thanks to the person who suggested off-list that I run Norton
WinDoctor and SpeedDisk on my PC.  That didn't directly fix it, but
it triggered the fix.  So THANKS!

I had already run WinDoctor (I try to do that regularly) but went
ahead because I'd uninstalled the Creative Labs software.

And I've tried the defrag (SpeedDisk) before but it always wants so
long to do it that I cancel (bad move I know).

Decided this time to let defrag take as long as it wanted, even
though it seemed unlikely to cause only PMMail trouble.  It also
occurred to me that I'd installed the latest MS security updates
and maybe they'd caused it.

So I moved all my PMMail files over to another machine while
defragging and ran PMMail there (this machine is older, slower, and
didn't have the latest MS patches, so it would test that too).  I
was immediately getting the same problem, lockups and massive
memory usage.  I thought "it must be PMMail".

The lockup and memory grabbing was happening typically in four
circumstances: open address book; reply to a message; type an
address in To: and hit TAB; and clicking on a folder to list the
messages.  Three of those four could be related to checking the
address book.

So I deleted all the files under "Tools" and PRESTO!, memory usage
around 8Mb or less (it varies) and no lockups.  Put back all the
files under "Groups", still fast.  Put back everything except
Addr.db and still fast.

I was going to put back Addr.db and then I realized it wasn't
showing as ~19000 bytes, it was 19602_K_b!!!!  Opened Addr.db in
TextPad and discovered one address was repeated a lot.  Turned out
that one alias was repeated 131,072 times, each time followed by a
blank line and a blank address-book entry!!  I deleted all the
blanks lines and entries, and all but one occurrences of that
alias, and the file size became 19K.  Ran PMMail and it seems to be
better (slightly slower now that there's an address book than when
there was none, but not significantly).  PMMail is taking ~10Mb of
memory (earlier it was 6Mb but it's no biggie).

So thanks everyone for your help!

Can anyone suggest how the Addr.db got screwed up?  If it were in
there 10 times maybe it was something I did, but NOT 131,072
times!! :(

Thanks again!


andrew [awebber@wwwebbers.com]
------
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