[Xapian-devel] writabledatabase_delete_document()

[Alexander Lind]

Hi guys

I have implemented xapian on a website, and it currently has about 2M
items in its index.

Its all been working quite nicely so far, until I tried removing some
old items from the index (removing items when the index was smaller was
no problems at all).

When I try to remove them now (using writabledatabase_delete_document()
via php), it halfway freezes up the machine, and the apache httpd runs
amok spawning more and more children, until I break the php script that
is trying to remove documents from xapian.

>From my laymens point of view, it seems that the xapian delete document
function freezes up the OS on a filesystem level. Is this a correct
assessment?

Any ideas on how I can get xapian _not_ to freeze up the system like
this when deleting documents?

I'm using php 5.2.0, and xapian 0.9.9.

This is a 'ls -lha' of the xapian index dir:
total 1.3G
drwxr-xr-x    2 malte    users         408 Dec  1 17:22 .
drwxr-xr-x   16 malte    users         400 Nov 15 20:21 ..
-rw-------    1 malte    users           0 Dec  1 17:22 db_lock
-rw-r--r--    1 malte    users          10 Nov 24 00:39 meta
-rw-r--r--    1 malte    users        468M Dec  1 17:22 position_DB
-rw-r--r--    1 malte    users        7.4K Dec  1 16:46 position_baseB
-rw-r--r--    1 malte    users        324M Dec  1 17:23 postlist_DB
-rw-r--r--    1 malte    users        5.1K Dec  1 16:46 postlist_baseB
-rw-r--r--    1 malte    users         61M Dec  1 17:22 record_DB
-rw-r--r--    1 malte    users         956 Dec  1 16:46 record_baseB
-rw-r--r--    1 malte    users        339M Dec  1 17:22 termlist_DB
-rw-r--r--    1 malte    users        5.4K Dec  1 16:46 termlist_baseB
-rw-r--r--    1 malte    users         99M Dec  1 17:22 value_DB
-rw-r--r--    1 malte    users        1.6K Dec  1 16:46 value_baseB


Thanks for your help.
Alec