Am Sa., 17. Juni 2023 um 23:49 Uhr schrieb Andy Smith <a...@strugglers.net>: > > Hi, > > I'm using v0.31.4 on Debian 11. I have ~3.9 million messages in my > archive and the notmuch database currently takes up 85GiB (though > actually "only" 51GiB due to btrfs zstd:1 compression).
Wow ;) > I did remove a few hundred thousand messages from my archive but the > space used by the database did not go down at all. > > If I ran "notmuch compact" should I expect any space to be > reclaimed? > > The manual page says that this builds a new copy of the database and > then switches them over. Does that imply that I will need nearly the > same amount of space again to perform the compact, until it finishes > and the old database is discarded? Yes. > The manual page says that the new database is built "in a temporary > directory". Where is that directory exactly? Is it inside the > current notmuch database directory or is it in $TMPDIR? I ask Your notmuch db has a xpian subdir, by default named `xapian`. The compact is done in a new dir `xapian.compact` which is a sibling dir to `xapian`. > because it looks like I'll need to make sure that there about 50GiB > of space available wherever that is. > > I'm aware that this procedure is going to take a really really long > time. If my machine should crash, or the notmuch process runs out of > memory or something, will my database be left in a functional state? You can tell `notmuch compact` to move the existing db to a backup dir (on the same file system) after a successful compaction. So, if you don't want to take the risk of `notmuch compact` wrongly considering the process to be successful, just specify a backup dir. Either the compaction fails, in which case the original db is untouched. (In case of a hard crash a file lock might be stale, but that should be it.) Or it succeeds and the old db is in the backup dir. Disclaimer: Back up manually to a different fs before ... or just take a btrfs snapshot. > If I have to reindex it, that is going to take even longer, so I > have to think about how much I want what is probably a very marginal > amount of space back! On my comparatively small db, gains are typically substantial (postlist, position), even though I compact from time to time. Expect 4 tables to be compactified (if you want to start a trial run, say). Cheers Michael _______________________________________________ notmuch mailing list -- notmuch@notmuchmail.org To unsubscribe send an email to notmuch-le...@notmuchmail.org
