From time to time we have to clean the workspace for a configuration. e.g. This can happen if you stop a build during a subversion check-out and the working copy is broken. The configuration is unusable until it is cleaned and it often isn't possible to manually call subversion to clean up the workspace. The easiest way is to clean the workspace in Quickbuild but it completely locks the server down while the data is deleted, and no subsequent requests are responded to. For large workspaces, the server can be unresponsive for a long period of time (5+ minutes).

Why is it necessary for the server to deny all other server requests while this action is performed?