[rt-users] Help! RTX-Shredder eats all my memory...

[Howard Jones]

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