Loading Mail Parsers takes a lot of memory

[schneems]

See this line:

valid_email2/lib/valid_email2/address.rb

Line 26 in 3ff4c92

@address = Mail::Address.new(address)

If you run this script you'll see that loading parsers from the Mail gem requires a LOT of memory:

require 'mail'
require 'get_process_mem'

before = GetProcessMem.new.mb
address = Mail::Address.new("developer@example.com")
address.domain
after = GetProcessMem.new.mb

puts "Enabling email parsing requires #{after - before} mb of memory"
# => Enabling email parsing requires 30.9296875 mb of memory

Just throught you should know. Also since the call usually happens at run time instead of load time it's 30mb of memory use for every process.

Here's a discussion on the issue and a proposed (but not accepted) alternative

• Issue: address_lists_parser.rb requires a lot of memory (~30 mb) mikel/mail#1342 (comment) (closed, but it's still a known problem)
• Alternative: Use ragel-bitmap for less memory mikel/mail#1343

[dogweather]

Suggestion: somehow enable the user to choose whether to optimize for speed (current version) or memory (proposed change). That is, instead of trying to please everyone or making these optimization decisions ahead of time. :-)

My use case: A Rails app which only occasionally sends email and never receives it. But every instance pays the 30+ MB price, making it difficult to run efficiently on a PaaS, Heroku.

[micke]

Hi, sorry for not attending to this earlier!

I like the idea, and would prefer the default behaviour to use the mail gem.
I currently have no spare time to put into this feature, but i would gladly accept a PR!

[phoet]

If I understand the example correctly, the current implementation will only load the 30MB when the first validation is run, not on startup?! 🤔

[bitshaker]

Is this considered fixed based on mikel/mail#1623 ?

[phoet]

🤷 i dont think that this was ever a problem as it looked like the mail gem was not required on startup here. i'm going ahead and close it. if anyone has a different opionion, please let me know.