Large cache, saving frontpage

We have an extremely large cache (50,000+ file & directories at a time). A huge annoyance is whenever we save the front page the garbage collector wants to traverse and check and update all 50k+ cache files and expire them. This ends up timing out as filesystem commands are inherently slow especially with that many files.

I have dug through most of the plugin and haven’t found a *nice* place where I could add a filter to prevent this. My first thought was to add all the files to the protected list, however that just means the code will read all the files in the system twice.

Any advice on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated!