[Dovecot] index file vs. memory

[Timo Sirainen]

On Tue, 2006-02-21 at 20:36 +0100, Gunter Ohrner wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 21. Februar 2006 17:59, schrieb Timo Sirainen:
> > You moved them to another IMAP folder, or a local folder?
> 
> I moved them from one IMAP folder to a direct "neighbour folder".
> 
> > Do the messages you're moving have any keywords set? eg. some Spam
> > keyword? Some IMAP clients set them automatically.
> 
> Good question, how can I find out? I did not set any keyword manually and 
> I do not know if kMail does it behind my back...
> 
> A ''find .Mailinglisten.Software.Linux.Kernel.* -iname "*keywords*"'' does 
> not return anything.

It's in maildir filename. a..z letters after "2," string in the base
filename. For example "1059756594.2405.mbox:2,a" has "a" keyword. The
"a" is mapped to the actual keyword name in dovecot-keywords file.

> It also happened with the "stable" release I had before, which even did 
> not support keywords.

Ok, so not that then.

> > Anyway it looks like the heap has grown about 200MB. It shouldn't be
> > doing that.. I tried testing with Kmail v3.5.1 a bit but couldn't break
> > it.
> 
> I just wonder what I'm doing wrong, or at least differently than anyone 
> else... I never saw a report before and I do not only have these problems 
> since yesterday...
> Maybe it's just because I'm running dovecot on such a weak machine and you 
> won't notice it as much on a faster one with more RAM...

Since it's growing heap, the process size never goes down. And I've
never noticed imap processes larger than 20MB or so (unless there have
been many tens of thousands of mails).

> If I can do anything to help to debug it, just tell me!

Could you try running some of the imap commands manually to see where
exactly it grows the process size?

MAILDIR_COPY_WITH_HARDLINKS=1 MAIL=maildir:/var/maildir/user /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap
x select mailbox
x create tempbox
x copy 1:* tempbox
x select tempbox
x store 1:* +flags \deleted
x expunge

or instead of 1:* you could try something like 1:100,150:300,350:500

If none of those commands grow the memory usage, then answer these:

You said it happens while moving mails. Have you tried if it happens
with only copying? Also does it matter what mailbox you're copying the
mails to? Mostly that your destination mailbox isn't something with
millions of messages, right? :)
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