Help! RTX-Shredder eats all my memory

I’ve been cleaning out my RT 3.6.5 installation of junk, prior to doing
an upgrade to 3.8 (my logic being that I’ll need to do some mysql
charset changes, and the less data the better/quicker).

However, after shredding about 150,000 of the 200,000 extra users
(spammers), rtx-shredder has started to eat all my memory:

Mem: 4151192k total, 4125908k used, 25284k free, 136k buffers
Swap: 4095992k total, 1137312k used, 2958680k free, 554128k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
31098 root 15 0 3061m 2.6g 3028 D 61.9 64.6 2:39.05 rtx-shredder

It will actually go through all the swap too, then die.

How can I find out what is causing this? My command-line is:
…/rtx-shredder --force --plugin
"Users=status,enabled;no_tickets,true;limit,100;replace_relations,nobody"

Presumably either something is getting confused and looping, or I have
something left over from a large mail loop at some stage. I did end up
setting DependenciesLimit up to >10000 at one stage while shredding
tickets… (it’s now down to 2000).

If I leave it for a while (days/weeks) then start again, then it will
shred for a few thousand then do it again. That leads me to believe it’s
a particular user that is causing the problem.

Has anyone else hit this? Unfortunately, the system in question is a
32-bit OS, so 4GB is the limit of the physical memory. I guess I can add
more swap, but I get the impression that this will just grow and grow.

Thanks in advance for any pointers,

Howie

Maybe Shredder will delete some tickets.

Take a look at this bug:
http://rt3.fsck.com/Ticket/Display.html?id=14170&user=guest&pass=guest

Loos, Christian wrote:

Maybe Shredder will delete some tickets.

Take a look at this bug:
http://rt3.fsck.com/Ticket/Display.html?id=14170&user=guest&pass=guest


I don’t think this is what is biting me though - it has been happily
shredding up until now (300K+ tickets). Then again, we have (had) 350000
tickets, so I don’t know each one intimately, and wouldn’t notice if it
did delete some of them accidentally.

I suppose I’ll need to go hunting in the database schema and find the
{something} with a lot of associated {something-else}, or a circular
reference of some kind, but I was hoping for a bit of direction :slight_smile: