The following question was asked on the Mailsmith mailing list

The box gives info for the Database Cache and on my machine the size is about 2000K. When the cache hits 87% full, it starts to empty and while it's doing this, Msmith grinds to a halt.

So...what I want to know is how to increase the size of the Database cache?

I think that Msmith would run a lot quicker if this could be done.

To which Rich Siegel of Bare Bones Software answered

The size of the database cache is proportional to the amount of available application memory as of when Mailsmith starts up, with a minimum size of 512K, and a cap of 2048K (2MB). During batch database operations, the cache is "governed" and flushed when the subsystem detects that there's less than 256K of unused cache.

Since the time required to flush the cache is proportional to the amount of data in the cache, this is in fact not the case. As you increase the size of the cache, flushes will indeed happen less often, but they will take longer, so you don't gain any time overall, and you pay the price of having to wait even longer when you -do- flush the cache.

Mailsmith will run a lot quicker when we get rid of the current bottlenecks that limit database throughput.