squirrel/qmail/quota question [Success]

[Jeff Hinrichs]

> Thanks for replying.  Peter Risdon told me that earlier but I forgot to
> say that i got it working.  I was wondering if since that file I was
> accessing was only 1M, and it took up about 10M of memory, do files for
> example 2M take up about 20M of memory? Is the relation 1:10 or more?
>
> Im just speculating coz I want to make concrete rules for php.ini to
> follow that are safe on system resources.
>
It really depends on the file. I am surprised that a 1.2M attachment used so
much memory.  When sending attachments, they are normally mime encoded,
because mail doesn't like the high bits set.  Anyway, I normally expect a 2x
memory usage.  That is 1M attachment takes 2M of space once encoded.

the attachment size is always listed as the un-mimed size of the file not
how
much space it's taking while it's encoded.  I would leave it set a 16MB and
tell your MTA to reject any attachment bigger than 5MB.  But that depends
on the terrain.  Anything bigger and they *should* be using sFTP.

We can dream can't we<g>

-jeff

p.s. Check out squirrelmail on and see if there are any problems with
the mime functions in v1.40, a quick look see at the CVS should tell
you if there is.  That might be an answer to why a 1.2M file ate up
over 8M of memory.
http://cvs.sf.net/viewcvs.py/squirrelmail/squirrelmail/functions/mime.php?only_with_tag=SM-1_4-STABLE