Jani Nikula writes: > On Mon, 03 Feb 2014, Hamish Downer 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. > When I initially indexed my email archives into notmuch, I had problems with thermal cutouts, so I did something like this, which automated the workaround you mention: while :; do timeout -s INT 2m notmuch new sleep 600 done Of course, with memory issues as the constraint rather than temperature, the sleep should not be necessary. -- regards, kushal