How much is not much?

[Michael Hudson-Doyle]

James Cloos <cloos at jhcloos.com> writes:

> The last time I tried to run notmuch new on my incoming archive it
> crashed the box.
>
> But back then the archive was on an external drive, several usb-storage
> and general usb bugs have been fixed since then, and my dives are all
> internal now.
>
> So it is time for another try.
>
> But first, how much ram and disk should I expect to need, as a function
> of the size of the maildir archive?
>
> (It is a tree of dirs, with maildir dirs at the leaves.  OTOH 20+ M
> messages and just under 256 Go, base on du(1).)
>
> Trying to avoid data loss due to crashes...

I can't answer to memory, but as a rule of thumb the notmuch database
seems to be around the same size as the mail it indexes.  I think by any
measure you have quite a lot of mail :-)

Cheers,
mwh