A slice of a chunk's text keeps the whole text alive (tens of MB) for as long as the file it belongs to stays open: message-ids, file details and cache keys are now copies. edge:bench on boneless: peak RSS 1,137 → ~660 MB, external memory 570 → 40–75 MB, the same speed (~190k headers/s); the same results on 800k real lines. edge:bench prints the breakdown. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>