[p4] Obliterate metrics

[David Ferguson]

Okay, we split our depot into two last summer.  I'm finally getting around to
cleaning up all the old cruft that is now obsolete (since it was put into the
other depot)...
Two choices:
obliterate
checkpoint surgery.
 
Surgery works, but support really seems to frown on it.
 
obliterate works ...  But wow it's slow.  Anybody got metrics on how slow?
 
Currently, I'm obliterating one depot path by obliterating each individual
file.  This process seems to be operating at approximately 1000 files per
hour...  At this rate, I will finish obliterating 20% of my old code in 40
days... (Note -- all of these files are basically 2 revisions each.)
Rudimentary tests indicate that obliterating directories at a time didn't
seem much better time-wise and ran into HUGE CPU/locking issues.
I'm running 2006.2 server and using a dedicated HP 385, 8 CPU, 64G memory
that is doing nothing OTHER than obsoleting...  When I do this for real, it
is going to have to share duties with the active dev tree...
Anybody got a better process I should be using?
 
-daf
Manager: 
VMware Source Configuration Management Team