Delete not working

[Murg]

Delete is not working in 6.54. At least not when multiple groups are combined into a single tab. I think that behaviour has been going on for some time.

While the items are disappearing off of the group screen when deleted, they aren't being deleted in the database, so they show up in any historical display of the groups.

Something I saw once leads me to think that this is related to items that are in multiple groups.

[Quade]

I've not seen it fail recently. Wonder if you waited long enough? It's a background process. If you keep deleting them does it eventually go away?

Delete's only apply to the currently loaded group so, if you load a single group and delete from there, it won't delete from any other group that's not currently loaded into the same post list.

I'll see if I can reproduce it. I assume you're using "Shift-Delete" because just plain delete doesn't actually delete anything.

[Murg]

I'm using the Delete Posts button (mark posts as deleted), which I customised the icon bar with.

And the time frame is several days and multiple invocations of the program.

I have three groups in a Groups List folder (or whatever they're called). So the three groups get displayed together.

[Quade]

I'm using the Delete Posts button (mark posts as deleted), which I customised the icon bar with.

"(mark posts as deleted)"

Is kind of throwing me off. If you look in the right click menu you'll see

"Mark Posts Old"
and
"Delete Posts (Shift-del)"

The second one actually deletes the posts, the first just marks them old. I'll assume you're using the second one but, you might want to confirm your shortcut to make sure it's using that one.

[Murg]

I customised the Main tool bar. Added the Customise/Commands/Posts/Delete Posts button to it.

Two entries above this one is the 'Mark Posts Old', which I'm not using.

[Quade]

Well, how about selecting them and using Shift-Delete then give it a few seconds, then re-load the group and see if they're gone.

I need to find some cross posts and try specifically deleting them. Cossposts should show multiple groups in the post list.

[Murg]

Delete is now working in 6.56.

Thanks...

[Murg]

Sorry, delete is not working in 6.56.

It worked on non-old headers (permanent deletion), but is not working on old headers.

Cross-posted headers doesn't seem to be a factor.

[Murg]

Some times delete is working, sometimes it isn't.

It seems to be working on non-old headers.

For old headers, it seems to work for smaller number of items, but if you're deleting 1000s at a time, then it doesn't seem to work.

[Quade]

I'll check it out in 6.60. There aren't going to be anymore 6.5X releases. I have a feeling I already addressed this though and improved the performance of delete.

[Murg]

Ok. Delete is working.

If you are deleting many headers it takes a long time. With no indication that the actual deletion is a background process. This is what lead to the confusion.

When exiting Newsbin, it looks like delete doesn't save the headers to be deleted that haven't been deleted yet, so they never get deleted.

Now my question is how do I reclaim the 10s of gigabytes of database space now being consumed by deleted headers?

[Quade]

Right click the group "Post Storage/Compact Database".

When you download headers again through, It'll just re-use the space left after the delete. The DB file will just stop growing.

[antisane]

I have the same problem with delete taking forever, but in in large/busy groups.

The only way to know if it is done is watch the task manager (newsbin takes up about 10-12% of the CPU while this is happening). And as was said before, if I exit and restart the posts are back that I told it to delete.

Going on 2+ hours now for 1 of my groups that I tried to cleanup Image link not allowed for unregistered users

[Murg]

I wonder if it is doing one delete sql per header, or building a delete table and issuing a single delete command for all the deletes in a chunk?

[Quade]

It collects up all the records and then starts a transaction and deletes within a transaction. Each delete has to delete from 3 different tables.

I don't get why you have so many to delete. You're not re-downloading headers each time are you?

[Murg]

Some of the groups are getting thousands of spam headers a day (or meaningless character combinations).

If you look at multiple groups like this, then you can get tens of thousands of deletions a day.

When you say it collects up all the records, is that for a single Delete UI action? So, if I delete 5 sets of posts, does it do 5 SQL deletes or does it aggregate them into a single SQL delete? If it aggregates, how long does it wait before it decides there is nothing more to aggregate?

The problem wouldn't be so bad if it remembered the to-be-deleted-but-not-yet-deleted headers between sessions.

[Quade]

1 - Assume you have 10 groups loaded into a post list and this spam is posted to all 10 groups.

2 - You select 100 of these and shift-delete.

3 - Newsbin will collect the unique ID up for each crosspost and note each group. Each group has a unique ID for crossposts so, 10 groups, 10 crossposts = 10 ID's per post. One per group).

4 - Newsbin hands this information off to a worker thread.

5 - It partitions the data by group.

6 - It opens one group, starts a transaction, deletes 2-3 records per selected line set so, call is 200-300 deletes if you started with 100 selected posts. .

7 - Repeats 6 with a new group until all records have been deleted.


What I'm describing is worst case. Typically you don't have that many groups loaded and you don't have so many crossposts.

You can watch it work with procmon.

"Delete all Posts by Poster" is pretty effective too.

The problem wouldn't be so bad if it remembered the to-be-deleted-but-not-yet-deleted headers between sessions.

Leave it running till it's done.

[antisane]

Leave it running till it's done.

This would be easier if we had some type of notification telling us it was still working on it (or when it was done). Right now the only way to know this (as far as I know) is looking at windows task manager.

[Quade]

Yeah task manager or procmon. I'll think about it.

[Murg]

Basically, once we hit delete, and the UI comes back from doing whatever processing it does, then the delete should happen, even if we close Newsbin before the delete finishes. If we close Newsbin before the delete finishes, it should continue the delete the next time it is run.