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

[Timo Sirainen]

On Jan 29, 2008, at 6:03 PM, Daniel Watts wrote:

> 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?

If you use IMAP DELETE command, it renames the directory to ..DOVECOT- 
TRASH (or something like it) and only after that it starts unlinking  
the files. It wouldn't be too difficult to have this return success  
immediately and then keep deleting the files on the background. I'm  
not sure if this is worth the trouble though. It would also be  
possible to do this as a plugin.

> 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

You mean this was in the deleting process, or the other processes? The  
deleting process should have kept the maildir locked while it was  
deleting the files, so other processes were locked out. This is by  
design and can't be changed, at least until I some day add inotify  
support for maildir synchronization.

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