On Wed, 2006-02-15 at 00:42 +0100, Gunter Ohrner wrote:
However, deleting (marking as deleted) large batches of messages still requires lots of RAM:
28507 gunter 17 0 211m 30m 8572 R 82.9 50.5 6:45.00 imap
After the operation finishes, dovecot remains at a VIRT size of 209m.
This look pretty much for me, even for deleting 7000 messages in a row.
I just tried testing this myself in a mailbox with around 10000 mails. I tried deleting everything, I tried deleting messages from here and there (sorted the mails based on size and deleted half of them), etc. At no point did the process's size grow more than a few hundred kilobytes..
So, how large is the mailbox you're deleting messages from (ie. how many messages do you leave there)? With mbox or maildir? What client are you using to delete them? Are you deleting the messages in sequential order?