I like the verbose prompt of -MM in general, but on huge files, it causes a
proportionally huge amount of memory to be consumed, and a long delay when
opening the file (to count the lines).  It would be nice if less could
automatically fall back to the -M prompt if the file is larger than a
certain size, or to otherwise set an upper bound on memory usage.

----- Forwarded message from Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org> -----

Subject: Bug#134623: less: Automatically disable line numbers on very large files
Reply-To: Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>, 134623-maintonly@bugs.debian.org
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 16:12:38 -0500
From: Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <maintonly@bugs.debian.org>
Sender: Matt Zimmerman <mdz@alcor.net>

Package: less
Version: 373-2
Severity: wishlist

I like the verbose prompt of -MM in general, but on huge files, it causes a
proportionally huge amount of memory to be consumed, and a long delay when
opening the file (to count the lines).  It would be nice if less could
automatically fall back to the -M prompt if the file is larger than a
certain size, or to otherwise set an upper bound on memory usage.

----- End forwarded message -----

Dear Matt,
Your report is quit old and maintainers did not react on it. Time has
passed
and version at upstream increased.

Please check if the issue you describe is still relevant in the latest
version provided by Debian GNU/Linux.

If it is still an issue I would suggest to open a ticket at upstream [1]
because it is IMHO an upstream related issue. If you do so, please
provide the link here.

Regards,
Christian Buhtz

[1] -- <https://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/>