A large PERMVARS file means more virtual storage is used, and there is a small performance degradation. It does not in itself explain a crash unless you are running against a virtual memory quota. You need to look at the traceback to see what happened.

In 14.3 there is code to clean up old historical PERMVARS entries automatically. If you've been running LISTSERV for many years, this can make a big difference. But again, on your average mail server with 1G of RAM and 100G of disk space, another 1M of PERMVARS data isn't going to make a big difference.

  Eric