fast delete a lot of entries

[Derek Zhou <derek@shannon-data.com>]

dear list,

I was experimenting with slapd by adding a lot of entries then deleting them. What I found is adding speed is not bad but deletion speed is lacking. With or without dbsync, delete speed is around half of that of adding. Naively, I thought deleting should be easier than adding, because in adding you actually need to pass and write whole entry of data, while in delete you can just mark the database page as free? The DB file did not shrink after massive deletion; which kind of suggest that deleting is only marking page as free, not really return them to the OS. I am using the latest git tree and the mdb backend.

Another related idea is delete a whole branch from the DIT. LDAP is already hierarchical, to delete all entries under a branch, one would assume that there must be an better way than deleting entries with a client side script, like what I am doing? With SQL you can drop a table. With LDAP, can I delete a whole branch? 
  
-- 
Derek Zhou
Shannon Systems
http://www.shannon-sys.com