[Dovecot] index file vs. memory

[Willem Riede]

On 02/21/2006 03:29:33 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> 
> 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).

Here are some statistics of the imap process serving a mailbox of 75,000 
messages over time (~30 hours) - the first line of each group comes from 
"ps alx", the second from "cat /proc/15342/maps":


F   UID   PID  PPID PRI  NI    VSZ   RSS WCHAN  STAT TTY        TIME COMMAND
4   500 15342  2578  15   0  94648 77740 -      S    ?          1:10 imap
00595000-0071a000 rw-p 00595000 00:00 0                                  [heap]

4   500 15342  2578  15   0  95084 78256 -      S    ?          2:36 imap
00595000-00764000 rw-p 00595000 00:00 0                                  [heap]

4   500 15342  2578  15   0  95344 79532 -      S    ?          4:39 imap
00595000-007c4000 rw-p 00595000 00:00 0                                  [heap]

4   500 15342  2578  15   0  96164 79520 -      S    ?          6:11 imap
00595000-0088d000 rw-p 00595000 00:00 0                                  [heap]


During this time new mail came in, got read, and some of those messages were 
deleted. You can see that as the process ages, the heap does grow.

Regards, Willem Riede.