I'm currently using Net::SMTP and Net::POP3 to upload and download emails with large-ish attachments (5Megs).

The script is maxing out my CPU and taking a fairly long amount of time. To compare it to a regular email client it takes about 3x as long to download and uses 95% CPU intead of 10-15%.

I had assumed that most of the work here is simply waiting for the socket to have some data to read and blocking (and therefore yielding CPU to other processes) while it waits. I'm not doing anything with the downloaded message other than storing it (either directly to disk or into memory, makes no performance difference).

The issue is happening with 5.8.6 and 5.8.4 on both windows (activeperl) and debian.

In reply to Net::SMTP/POP3 very slow and CPU intensive -- IO::Socket blocking issue? by Max Demian

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