[rt-users] RTx-shredder with a very large database

[Jim Faulkner]

Hello,

I run a large RT installation.  We have around 20 queues, 200-300 users, 
and many more requestors.  I am currently running RT 3.0.12 on the 
production RT, and RT 3.4.5 on a development machine.

Unfortunately we get a lot of spam going into the RT queues.  The previous 
administrator of RT set up a way of dealing with this -- before going into 
RT all mail is checked with spamassassin, and if it reports a positive the 
mail is put into an RT queue named "ZZSpam".  Unfortunately over the years 
this "ZZSpam" queue has gotten extremely large, with about 250,000 
tickets, and is probably taking up the bulk of the database because many 
spams come with large attachments.

Because this ZZSpam queue has become so unweildy, I'd like to clean out 
all tickets from that queue, as well as all users, attachments, etc. that 
are associated with those tickets.  I've tried the rtx-shredder program, 
but it is extremely slow.  I issued this command on the devel RT, which 
is a dual 2ghz Xeon  machine with 1 GB of RAM, and has no load on it:
time /opt/rt3/sbin/rtx-shredder --force --plugin 
'Tickets=queue,ZZSpam;limit,20'

And it took 23 minutes and 17 seconds to complete.  Obviously if it takes 
that long to delete 20 tickets, I cannot use the tool to clean out 250,000 
tickets.

Is there anything I can do to make rtx-shredder significantly faster?  If 
not, does anyone have any advice as to how I should go about cleaning out 
this massive queue?

thanks for any help,
Jim Faulkner