What is the fastest way to delete thousands of items in the content tree?

Question

We are trying to delete tens of thousands of items in the content tree. However, it is taking a VERY long time to do that. We have tried to delete through the Sitecore Experience Editor and it is timing out. We love Sitecore Powershell Extensions (SPE), and have tried to use the Remove-Item cmdlet and that works but still takes a VERY long time...even overnight.

What is the fastest way to delete tens of thousands of items from the Sitecore content tree? Your help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

When I was working on Sitecore 7.2 project long time ago, the fastest way was to serialize the single root item and then clicking Revert Tree on that item. All the descendants were gone and I had to remove only the last item manually.

It worked in EventDisabler mode and it was much much faster than deleting items manually.

Answer 2

This is another option you have if you want to use Sitecore PowerShell Extensions. Delete the items in a BulkUpdateContext - this disables events etc... an so makes the delete run a lot faster. To do that in SPE you can use this syntax:

New-UsingBlock (New-Object Sitecore.Data.BulkUpdateContext) {
    Get-Item -Path master:/sitecore/Content/myItem | Remove-Item
}

Because this does disable events etc... you will probably need to re-index and run a smart publish once the items are deleted.

Answer 3

Another way to increase the speed of removing items is to skip the recycling bin. Here is an example in combination with using bulk update.

New-UsingBlock (New-Object Sitecore.Data.BulkUpdateContext) {
  Get-Item "master:/content/Something" | Remove-Item -Recurse -Permanently
}

Here is the documentation on deleting items permanently: https://doc.sitecorepowershell.com/working-with-items.html

Relevant information: "Permanently - Specifies the item should be deleted rather than recycled."

Answer 4

If you are not worried about missing reference for these deleted items, the faster way to do it is by using /sitecore/admin/dbbrowser.aspx tool.

It skips lot of pipeline processors which makes it much faster than deleting from content editor.

Answer 5

If your items are spread around the tree, write some code to do it and wrap it in all disablers you can. This blog has some nice info about it.

The SecurityDisabler will help the process a lot as no security is checked anymore. Disabling all events and index updates will also free a lot of resources for the actual delete.

You will need to clear the Sitecore caches and rebuild any indexes that refer to the items that you were updating afterwards as no events or index updates will be done.

Example:

using (new SecurityDisabler())
using (new DatabaseCacheDisabler())
using (new EventDisabler())
using (new BulkUpdateContext())
{
  try
  {
    Sitecore.Configuration.Settings.Indexing.Enabled = false;

    // delete items here
  }
  finally
  {
    Sitecore.Configuration.Settings.Indexing.Enabled = true;
  }
}

Answer 6

Not tested, but we can try with taking a package of parent item/node alone(one single item), and installing the same package with Overwrite option when asked for.

Answer 7

I was recently in the situation to delete lots of item from different places from a Sitecore solution v8.1u3 and I have used Sitecore Rock. I've used it in 2 ways:

1. Directly in the content tree of the Sitecore Rocks, just make a delete on the contextual menu when you right click on the items.
2. Or use Sitecore Query inside Sitecore Rocks. Example of delete queries.

Option #1 is slow, but option #2 was quite satisfactory for me. But I was in my development environment.

Answer 8

We can Use Sitecore Search interface in content editor to delete bulk children items,

1. Apply * in search box to result all the child items
2. Apply Delete results operation through search operations available inbuilt