[Pan-devel] Want to fix memory consumption issues

[Calin A. Culianu]

I really really want to fix the memory consumption issues in Pan.  
Namely, the problem that loading articles from groups with large numbers
of headers (like > 500,000)  tends to bring most boxes to a crawl, because
Pan ends up eating tons of memory.  It seems like roughly 1kb per article 
header!

So if I wanted to experiment with changing the memory needs of Pan (a
change that might be very invasive actually..).. What are the good places
to look?  One obvious place to optimize for memory use is changing struct
Article or the way that articles get loaded.  Another place might be the
gtk widget used to display the header pane... 

How _does_ the header pane get loaded (I'm blurry-eyed to read any more of
the sources now..)?  Ideally one would load text (from the struct Article
pointers) into it piecemeal as the user scrolls through the groups.  Is
that what happens.. or is the gtk widget for the header pane populated all
at once with possibly millions of articles?

-Calin