Retention policy not working without any new activity

[qspweissen]

Description:

We are currently testing the retention policy and we have the behavior that channels, rooms and private messages are not deleted if there is no new message/activity. When someone writes a new message, messages older than one day were deleted after 30 minutes. But without a new message, we can see messages older than 1 day.

Settings:

Steps to reproduce:

1. Write a message in a channels, rooms or direct messages
2. Wait one day and do not write any new message
3. After 1 day and 31 minutes you can see older messages
4. If i write a new message and wait 30 minutes, older messages were deleted

Expected behavior:

I expect that alle messages will be deleteted after 1 day even if no new message was written

Actual behavior:

Server Setup Information:

• Version of Rocket.Chat Server: 0.69.1
• Operating System: Debian 9
• Deployment Method: Official Rocket.Chat docker deployment image
• Number of Running Instances: 1
• DB Replicaset Oplog:
• NodeJS Version: 8.11.3
• MongoDB Version: 3.2

[fcoppolani]

I can reproduce the same behaviour on 0.69.2 with 2 running instances

[localguru]

+1 same here on 0.69.2

[vynmera]

This behaviour is originally on purpose, as added by @ggazzo, and also discussed in #11725, as it adds a performance boost.

However, it's worth the effort to consider making this optional or removing this behavior altogether in favor of faster deletion.

I've been very busy lately, so I don't have much time to pick this up. But if I do have the time, I'll try to pick it up, together with some other related issues.

[hanynowsky]

Actually, for our case, we do not care for processing power. So the ideal is to add a boolean option that allows the user to select whether he/she wants to force pruning or keep the standard behavior:

• Standard behavior = Do not trigger pruning unless channel has new activity
• Forced behavior = Prune the channel despite whether there is activity or not.

As a workaround, we are using a crontabbed script that calls the API and posts a dummy message every 24 hours, on every single channel. Which is so ugly :(

Thanks for your reactiveness.

@ggazzo Please change the milestone to 0.72.0 as 0.71.0 is already packaged without the fix.

[ggazzo]

sorry guys I was/am working with another issues, this week I will fix :)

[danielslyman]

+1

[mddvul22]

Any progress on this bug?

[ggazzo]

closed by #15252