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Postbox - why does it take up so much RAM?

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daniirwan

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 28, 2010
37
0
Hi all.

I'm on the verge of transitioning from viewing my email in Safari/Chrome to using a dedicated mail app. Mail.app seems to be slow in pulling in new mail, Thunderbird is just plain archaic & ugly, Sparrow is pretty but limited (no Gmail priority Inbox view!). The most viable option I've tested is Postbox 3.0. It does everything that I want, is pretty and is quite fast. However, it uses up a HUMONGOUS amount of RAM! Via Activity Monitor, I see it takes up at least 200MB+ of RAM, and the most I've seen it use is 600+MB! Granted my Gmail account is pretty large (15000 emails and counting), but I've tried reducing it by unsubscribing from all unnecessary folders & indexing all the necessary ones (indexing has been completed btw).

Resource usage is important for me, as my MBA only has so much RAM.

Any idea why Postbox does this?
 
C

cjred

macrumors member
Dec 1, 2009
40
0
daniirwan said:
Hi all.

I'm on the verge of transitioning from viewing my email in Safari/Chrome to using a dedicated mail app. Mail.app seems to be slow in pulling in new mail, Thunderbird is just plain archaic & ugly, Sparrow is pretty but limited (no Gmail priority Inbox view!). The most viable option I've tested is Postbox 3.0. It does everything that I want, is pretty and is quite fast. However, it uses up a HUMONGOUS amount of RAM! Via Activity Monitor, I see it takes up at least 200MB+ of RAM, and the most I've seen it use is 600+MB! Granted my Gmail account is pretty large (15000 emails and counting), but I've tried reducing it by unsubscribing from all unnecessary folders & indexing all the necessary ones (indexing has been completed btw).

Resource usage is important for me, as my MBA only has so much RAM.

Any idea why Postbox does this?
Click to expand...

It's just postbox is too much bloat. though they have one of the best features
 
R

RobinD42

macrumors newbie
May 12, 2014
3
0
I would be very happy if my postbox *only* comsumed 600M. Currently mine is sitting at a little over 2G, and I've seen spikes up to 5G! If I didn't have a large amount of RAM in this system I wouldn't use postbox at all now that it is using this much RAM. As it is I can't use it at all on my macbook which has only 8G unless I am not running any other major application at the time. This is very outrageous for an email application. I'm just hanging on for a while until something like postbox comes along that is a little smarter about managing its memory footprint, then I'm dumping it.
 
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RobinD42

macrumors newbie
May 12, 2014
3
0
I did. Their response was that they'd rather be fast than memory efficient. I can understand that attitude for a 600MB footprint, but 2-5 GB is too much.
 
SaSaSushi

SaSaSushi

macrumors 601
Aug 8, 2007
4,156
553
Takamatsu, Japan
RobinD42 said:
I did. Their response was that they'd rather be fast than memory efficient. I can understand that attitude for a 600MB footprint, but 2-5 GB is too much.
Click to expand...

Not sure what's going on with your setup but on my iMac it averages around 300-400MB. That's with six accounts and 50,000+ messages. I've been using Postbox for a few years now with no problems.
 
saberahul

saberahul

macrumors 68040
Nov 6, 2008
3,645
111
USA
RobinD42 said:
I did. Their response was that they'd rather be fast than memory efficient. I can understand that attitude for a 600MB footprint, but 2-5 GB is too much.
Click to expand...

Interesting response. They should be focused on improving both, not one over the other.
 
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RobinD42

macrumors newbie
May 12, 2014
3
0
saberahul said:
Interesting response. They should be focused on improving both, not one over the other.
Click to expand...

Well now I'm a bit embarassed that I complained so much about it, but I followed the advice the Postbox folks gave me and now my Postbox process has stabalized at using around 575 Meg, which is still large but is much easier to swallow. I unsubscribed from the All Mail folders in the google apps accounts, then Reset All Folders, followed by Index All Folders and then restarted Postbox.

BTW, I have about 320k messages total :eek: which is about 3 times more than I would have guessed, and is also a little embarassing.
 
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