[Dovecot] dovecot memory consumption beta vs. old "stable" series

[Gunter Ohrner]

Whoops, sorry for the late answer, I somehow missed your response!

Am Sonntag, 22. Januar 2006 13:33, schrieb Timo Sirainen:
> > dovecot beta's memory requirements are much better than in the old
> Probably somewhat similar.

Mh, ok.

> > messages causes major troubles on this box - more than 500 MB of
> > virtual memory allocated to the "imap" process is quite a lot and
> > often causes random processes to fall victim to the OOM killer. :-(
> Umm. If it's allocating 500MB when deleting messages there's something
> seriously wrong. I haven't heard this happening with any Dovecot
> version before.

Ok. Well, it does and it's easily reproduceable with this stable 
release. :-)

I want to upgrade dovecot to a recent beta. If the problem also happens 
with this version, I could try to help to track it down. Or should I 
first do some tests with the currently installed release?

> With "deleting" do you mean marking messages as deleted, or the expunge
> operation?

It seems to be the marking. It happens if I "delete" messages from kMail, 
instead of moving them to trash. I'm not sure what happens under the hood 
if I do, but the message files seem to stay there, at least until the 
imap process exits cleanly.

> With mbox or maildir? 

maildir

> Does it matter how many messages you're deleting?

Yes, that's the reason. I run into it if I clean up my Spam which I do in 
about 2 week intervals. I just tested it, deleting (marking) 6000 to 7000 
files caused dovecot to grow to more than 200 MB:

 9253 gunter     9   0  203m  14m  12m S  0.0 23.0   6:40.52 imap

I noticed that the REAL memory consumption starts if dovecot gets OOM 
killed in the first try and I retry after artificially increasing the 
swap space size. If repeating the same operation after this kill, dovecot 
easily eats twice as much VIRT memory than it would have before. (This 
"would have" is extrapolated from experience in this case, of course.)

Maybe it's somehow index related, if the killed process leaves stale  or 
corrupt index files?

> How large the mailbox itself is? 

Currently about 17000 files. (My Spam since the beginning of January.)

Thanks,

  Gunter

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