[Dovecot] More efficient Deleting of a whole folder (or Purging Trash)

[Daniel Watts]

Hi,

I've straced a few dovecot processes after hitting purge on a large 
Trash folder (35,000 messages). It looks like it is going through each 
message, one by one, and removing (unlinking) each one.

Is there not a more efficient way to do this? If Dovecot knows the whole 
folder is being deleted (ie a Trash purge), could it do something clever 
with the filesystem to just remove the whole folder?

Incidently, the command that initially deleted those 35k messages to 
Trash took about 1 hour to complete on my server and effectively locked 
my account out for all that time. There were also an awlful lot of these 
output from my strace:

nanosleep({0, 131475000}, NULL)         = 0
lstat("/home/virtual/xxx.com/home/admin/Maildir/.Folders.Porter/dovecot-uidlist.lock", 
{st_mode=S_IFREG|0600, st_size=0, ...}) = 0

Not sure if there's much one can do about speeding up deleting a lot of 
messages though. My webmail client has a 'delete all messages' button 
for each folder. If there was an efficient IMAP command for deleting a 
whole folder that would be useful in those circumstances.

Interested to know if there is anything that can be improved.

Thanks,
Daniel


Dovecot 1.0.9
XFS Filesystem
Maildir Directories