I decided to tackle a large purge job on a single product area. It was way to large to purge in a single shot. The goal was to keep only 2 iterations of Released objects. I estimated there were 120K purgable iterations in just this area. I will paste some graphs and notes at the end but here is what I learned:
- If too large, try determining a threshold by adjusting the number of iterations to keep and slowly walk that down.
- Purge Parts and CAD docs together. Too many dependencies to leave out one or the other.
- Use preview - HTML to get a count of the total number of objects found. I did not want to exceed 11000 items in a single job. There is a preference to control this.
- Chunk - There is a preference that controls how system chunks purge jobs. So a 10000 object job chunked at 1000 objects will create 10 chunks. Chunks are random so if an item needed to purge first is an a later chunk, dependent objects will failed to purge. See here: CS206660
- Chunk of -1 will be a complete set. By far the best option to ensure the maximum number of items are purged. I was seeing percent success from 50-80% of objects removed. Using chunk of 500 or 1000 is ok but percent purged dropped to 33%. Successive purges then dropped to around 5 or 6%. You can increase chunk to 3000 but this will increase time for purge to complete often with little increase in success percentages.
- Eventually I was dropping the number of iterations to keep by 1 but that soon exceeded my max purge job limit. You may have to skip to a lower iteration number with chunking to get the number of objects lower, then you can return to the previous iteration with chunk of -1 to get the whole set.
- Running off hours had better run times but you do not make best use of hours in a day.
Here is the data:
| Desc | Iterations | Total | Purged | Chunk | Time (mins) |
| 30-P-C | 30 | 2371 | 1965 | -1 | 47 |
| 20-P-C | 20 | 4805 | 3620 | -1 | 152 |
| 15-P-C | 15 | 6871 | 4962 | -1 | 276 |
| 14-P-C | 14 | 3929 | 1861 | -1 | 301 |
| 13-P-C | 13 | 4468 | 2265 | -1 | 420 |
| 12-P-C | 12 | 5047 | 2260 | -1 | 233 |
| 11-P-C | 11 | 5576 | 3210 | -1 | 378 |
| 10-P-C | 10 | 6658 | 3890 | -1 | 360 |
| 9-P-C | 9 | 7735 | 4716 | -1 | 310 |
| 8-P-C | 8 | 9071 | 5784 | -1 | 495 |
| 7-P-C | 7 | 10657 | 3302 | 1000 | 200 |
| 6-P-C | 6 | 16564 | 4965 | 3000 | 538 |
| 6-P-C(2) | 6 | 11819 | 568 | 1000 | 292 |
| 7-P-C(2) | 7 | 6522 | 3398 | -1 | 313 |
| 6-P-C(3) | 6 | 7888 | 4117 | -1 | 362 |
| 5-P-C | 5 | 14951 | 4629 | 500 | 183 |
| 5-P-C (2) | 5 | 10434 | 218 | 500 | 183 |
| 5-P-C (3) | 5 | 10216 | 6694 | -1 | 527 |
| 4-P-C | 4 | 17873 | 5810 | 500 | 328 |
| 4-P-C (2) | 4 | 12258 | 597 | 1000 | 222 |
| 2-P-C | 2 | 49060 | 15745 | 500 | 541 |
| 4-P-C (3) | 4 | 11545 | 687 | 1500 | 264 |
| 4-P-C-(4) | 4 | 10896 | 7250 | -1 | 666 |
| 3-P-C | 3 | 14457 | 588 | 500 | 229 |
| 3-P-C (2) | 3 | 13914 | 1797 | 500 | 654 |
| 3-P-C (3) | 3 | 12040 | 956 | 3000 | 448 |
| 3-P-C (4) | 3 | 11359 | 311 | 3000 | 451 |
| 2-P-C (2) | 2 | 23080 | 1362 | 3000 | 542 |
| 3-P-C (5) | 3 | 10969 | 6732 | -1 | 504 |
