old feed items are will not be deleted

[smoebody]

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• I have read the CONTRIBUTING.md and followed the provided tips

Explain the Problem

old news items are not deleted. my database by now is about 500MB (only the items-table) with 91385 items. i count 31 feeds.
feeds get updated by owncloud cronjob which runs as php-script every hour without errors.

examining the status i get the following result

SELECT count(status), status FROM `oc_news_items` group by status


count(status)	status	
5621	0	
85751	2	
13	4	 

System Information

• News app version: current stable
• ownCloud version: 8.2.9
• PHP version: 5.6.30
• Database and version: 5.5
• Distribution and version: ubuntu 12.04

Contents of owncloud/data/owncloud.log

{"reqId":"uLHk8igMCJOgfox6xwO2","remoteAddr":"178.25.191.165","app":"news","message":"Configuration value \"simplePieCacheDuration\" does not exist. Ignored value.","level":2,"time":"2017-02-19T16:09:17+00:00"}
{"reqId":"zMNXneDKKf\/dbshZMghR","remoteAddr":"178.25.191.165","app":"PHP","message":"Automatically populating $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. To avoid this warning set 'always_populate_raw_post_data' to '-1' in php.ini and use the php:\/\/input stream instead. at Unknown#0","level":3,"time":"2017-02-19T16:20:45+00:00"}

content of owncloud/data/news/config/config.ini

autoPurgeMinimumInterval = 60
autoPurgeCount = 200
maxRedirects = 10
maxSize = 104857600
exploreUrl = 
feedFetcherTimeout = 60