#22058 [Bgs]: Sending mail with large attachments uses unreasonable amounts of memory

ID: 22058 User updated by: brienfwd@bigfoot.com Reported By: brienfwd@bigfoot.com Status: Bogus Bug Type: PEAR related Operating System: linux PHP Version: 4.2.0 New Comment: wouldn't a more powerful mail api that is attachment aware and doesn't load the entire file into memory be feasible? Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2003-02-04 16:12:14] iliaa@php.net Thank you for taking the time to write to us, but this is not a bug. Please double-check the documentation available at http://www.php.net/manual/ and the instructions on how to report a bug at http://bugs.php.net/how-to-report.php This is nothing usual or something that can be addressed. When dealing with large strings in PHP, the memory usage will nearly always be few times larger then the original string especially if you are performing various string mangling functions on it. Your best solution may to switch from PEAR/IMP solution to something else not OO based that will make fewer copies of the string. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2003-02-04 15:41:57] brienfwd@bigfoot.com I've just tracked down a long standing problem I've had with the IMP webmail problem and large attachments. I've configure IMP 3.1/PEAR 1.0.1 to use SMTP to talk to a local mail server. Sending a message with a 13MB attachment (19 MB encoded) causes the memory usage to shoot up to 122MB. This seems to be due to the handling of the message body with regards to string copies and regular expression replacements. This effectively limits the size of attachements that are useable within imp not to mention puts a pretty big strain on my server. In particular, my installation seems to crap out consistently on the line inside the data() function: $data = preg_replace("/([^\r]{1})\n/", "\\1\r\n", $data); There are a couple of ways to solve this problem. The best solution, which is probably the hardest, is to refactor the SMTP api to be more aware of file attachments and avoid doing the read-file/encode/write-to-network on the entire file. If the SMTP layer was aware of file attachments, it could do the read- file/encode/write-to-network on reasonably sized blocks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=22058&edit=1