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

[Hamish Downer]

On 4 February 2014 08:25, Jani Nikula <jani at nikula.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 03 Feb 2014, Hamish Downer <hamish at foobacca.co.uk> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> 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.

That did it, thank you. Good to know Ctrl-C is gracefully handled.

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

I have saved a copy of the index from before I fixed the problem.  I am
happy to re-run it with a rebuilt notmuch if that would be useful from the
point of view of uncovering bugs.

Otherwise I'll carry on as a happy notmuch user
Hamish