# Rclone delete on S3 very slow

**URL:** <https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-delete-on-s3-very-slow/37543>\
**Category:** Help and Support\
**Created:** [April 12, 2023, 1:14pm UTC](https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-delete-on-s3-very-slow/37543 "2023-04-12T13:14:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 10

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ncw](https://forum.rclone.org/user_avatar/forum.rclone.org/ncw/32/18_2.png) [@ncw](https://forum.rclone.org/u/ncw)\
**Post date:** [April 17, 2023, 6:35pm UTC](https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-delete-on-s3-very-slow/37543/10 "2023-04-17T18:35:09Z")

</div>

The problem here is `rclone delete` is using recursive listing by default and this essentially means that it does each HEAD request single threaded. You can disable this with `--disable ListR`.

According to my experiments with a normal directory structure (generated with `rclone test makefiles --files 10000 --max-file-size 10b 10000files`) the speed of listing with an age filter seems to max out at about `--checkers 16` with `--disable ListR`.

What you are doing

```auto
$ time rclone delete --min-age 100d TestS3MinioManual:test --checkers 32

real	0m10.957s
user	0m4.254s
sys	0m0.760s

```

Now with `--disable ListR`

```auto
$ time rclone delete --min-age 100d TestS3MinioManual:test --checkers 32 --disable ListR

real	0m1.588s
user	0m5.489s
sys	0m0.732s

```

So I think you should be able to get a significant speedup by adding `--disable ListR` to your `rclone delete`.

You can also try this with just plain `rclone delete` (no `--disable ListR`)

[v1.63.0-beta.6959.b87a9c835.fix-listr-performance](https://beta.rclone.org/branch/fix-listr-performance/v1.63.0-beta.6959.b87a9c835.fix-listr-performance/) on branch [fix-listr-performance](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/tree/fix-listr-performance) (uploaded in 15-30 mins)

This does the HEAD requests in parallel so is a lot faster. However it still only fetches one page of things from AWS at once so will top out at 1024 HEADs in parallell.

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_[View the full topic](https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-delete-on-s3-very-slow/37543)._