Obliterating a large project

Alec · Post by **Alec** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 3:39 pm

I'm trying to obliterate a project that contains about 5000 files using the 2.0.1. demo. After clicking the Obliterate button the Admin tool was locked up for about an hour before it displayed a message that it lost its connection to the server. 4 hours later the SQL server process was still going. I restarted IIS to kill the SQL server process because our developers were complaining about the performance of the SQL server.

I tried again on a much smaller project and this time got a confirmation prompt. Since I never got this prompt for the large project, I assume that it would never have gone away, even if I left IIS running. Is this a know problem or is there some better way to obliterate a project?

Post by **jclausius** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 4:45 pm

alec:

it is not the number of files, but the history behind them. if you imported a vss database w/ 10 years of data, it can take a long time to remove a repository.

Alec · Post by **Alec** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 11:02 am

I'm willing to wait (not forever), but how do I get past the Admin client disconnecting before I even get the confirmation prompt? I tried again this moring and this time the process ran for 3+ hours before the Admin tool gave up. I still have an spobliteratefsobject process running in SQL Server.

Post by **jclausius** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 2:03 pm

i guess i didn't ask in my last post. are you obliterating something w/ a large amount of history?

obliterate performance has a lot of work to do - remove instances from all labels, historical trees/branches, shares, and item history. then, of course, the actual deletion of rows in database tables. there is no real way to tell how long it will take without knowing the intricacies of your repository, the history of the files, how many trees where they existed, the specs on your hardware, etc.

i apologize that i can't offer much more than that. although obliteration performance has improved since the 1.x generation of vault, it can still sometimes be too slow.

we have down on one of our "todo" lists to keep looking at ways to improve obliteration speeds.

Alec · Post by **Alec** » Fri Mar 19, 2004 3:11 pm

I undeleted the project that I was trying to obliterate and then tried to delete and obliterate one of the subprojects. It has about 700 modules in it (vs about 5000 for the project) and the results were pretty much the same (several hours of running without getting a confirmation prompt). I don't know how to quantify the amount of history, but the application is about 6 years old. SQL Server and the Vault server are running on the same server - a quad Xeon 600 with 2.5 GB RAM. The SQL Server is also the development SQL server for our application. This isn't something we're planning on doing too often, but we do it a few times a year. We'll probably upgrade the hardware later in the year, but for now this is probably what it's going to be.

Post by **jclausius** » Fri Mar 19, 2004 4:07 pm

not sure you want to do this, but you could delete and obliterate in smaller chunks.