[Dovecot] maildir memory usage

[Timo Sirainen]

On Mon, 2006-04-24 at 09:39 -0400, lenny at edpausa.com wrote:
> > On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 10:39 -0400, lenny at edpausa.com wrote:
> >> Dovecot beta 5 + dovecot lda, solaris 9 sparc.
> >>
> >> Dovecot seems to use a lot of memory with large Maildir folders,
> >> ( 300-500 mb folder - 100-200 mb process), something I never noticed
> >> with
> >> similarly large mboxes.
> >> Is that expected behavior or are my observations incorrect.
> >
> > It's not expected behavior. How many messages do the maildirs have?
> >
> 
> The biggest folder I can find now has ~70000+ messages and when that's
> open the process grows to 116mb, I'm not seeing 200mb+ process sizes
> today, but I certainly have seen them, so I'll keep looking for patterns.

Well, it's not necessarily a bug then with that many messages, although
it still does sound a bit high.

It would be useful if you knew how to reproduce this with some specific
mailbox. Then you could check:

 - How large are dovecot.index* files for the mailbox (especially
dovecot.index.cache)?
 - How large is the dovecot-uidlist file for the mailbox?
 - When closing the mailbox, how much memory does the process take now?
 - Does it use all that memory immediately when opening the mailbox or
only after doing something?

Especially useful would be if you were able to do this manually, eg.:

su user # to get correct uid/gid
MAIL=/home/user/Maildir /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap
x select mailbox
x unselect

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