Is there an advantage to obsoleting Activities in ClearCase UCM streams

Question

We are in the process of obsoleting a huge amount of ClearCase UCM projects, streams, branches etc. Is there a benefit of also obsoleting activities within the streams?

Answer 1

The main advantage of a cleartool lock -obs is making sure the commands/GUI listing those objects don't show by default the obsolete ones.
(See FAQ)

That is why you would obsolete branches or streams, labels or baselines: the graphical lsvtree will be much snappier without having to list all those objects.

But activities? That would matter if those activities are still presented as a choice when you checkout a file. If they are not (because, for instance, their stream is already obsolete), then it won't have a huge impact.
See "What do we need to lock/obsolete to discontinue a project?"

Answer 2

Another consideration is the number of activities/streams/projects in question. If you're -obsoleting something like 90% of the activities, then you may want to retire the streams in question and create new ones. If you're doing that to 90% of the streams in a project, you might want to consider retiring the project and creating a new one.

an obsolete lock does not prevent the objects in question from being looked up (to get the list of activities in a stream, for example) it just prevents them from being displayed by default in the GUI or on the command line.