notmuch killed due to out of memory - how to move forward

[Jani Nikula]

On Mon, 03 Feb 2014, Hamish Downer <hamish at foobacca.co.uk> wrote:
> Hello
>
> I recently deleted almost 30000 old messages from my maildirs, and
> since I did that, notmuch new has not managed to complete.  I have it
> running on a server with 1 GB of RAM, and the output is telling me
>
>     Cleaned up 25515 of 29803 messages (1m 10s remaining).
>
> at the point it is killed.  I have followed it up to this point with
> top and free and I can see memory usage growing to something like
> 700MB (RES) at which point the process is killed.
>
> I am using notmuch 0.17 (from the debian jessie package 0.17-3) on
> debian wheezy 64 bit.
>
> Any pointers as to what to do to get past this point would be greatly
> appreciated.  If I have just deleted that many messages should I just
> expect notmuch to use that much memory?  (Unfortunately the company
> supplying the server does not allow swap to be enabled so I can't fudge
> it that way)
>
> I did also try running it with NOTMUCH_TALLOC_REPORT, but that didn't
> produce a report (though I was unsure if I needed to rebuild notmuch
> before that would work).
>
> Happy to build notmuch from source if this might be an interesting bug
> worth tracking down.

Please try SIGINT, or ^C, on notmuch new before it gets killed. That
should be handled gracefully, making progress, and letting you chop up
and eventually finish the operation. Please let us know if this helps.

Needless to say, we shouldn't use that much memory just to delete files
from the index.


BR,
Jani.