Question: rmdir recursive - is it safe to parallelize?

I see that the rmdir method can remove recursively. However, I need to remove a very large tree. Because this function does an await on every delete, it is painfully slow for my use case.

See https://github.com/theophilusx/ssh2-sftp-client/blob/d6b170aaefaaca21a3f95f84f581410141c222ac/src/index.js#L943-L948

Just wonder if you happen to know if this operation is safe to parallelize? Even if I have to manually implement a limit that be ok.

[theophilusx]

Just about to push v8.0.0, so closing this issue now.

[theophilusx]

I have made some changes to the rmdir method which might help your use case. Two main tings I have done are

• Re-worked the tracking of event listeners to eliminate the previous problem where recursive and parallel calls would tread on each other.
• Modified the rmdir method so that now it uses Promise.all() to run all delete file methods asynchronously. This should improve performance when directories have large numbers of files which need to be removed before the directory can be removed.

The actual removal of directories is still synchronous because the recursive nature makes it too easy to blow out when there is a deep tree and many recursive calls.

I would be great if you could try this out and see if it helps your use case or not. The updated code is in the github repository under the branch called ‘rmdir-performance’. Be great to have it tested on a large directory tree.