Joomla 3.1: extremely slow in bulk deletion - joomla

Question

I have a simple script to delete articles from a category, it takes forever to delete about 10k articles, here's my code:
//include libraries
$db = JFactory::getDbo();
$query = $db->getQuery(true);
$query->select(array('id'));
$query->from('#__content');
$query->where('catid = 14');
$db->setQuery($query);
$results = $db->loadObjectList();
$table = JTable::getInstance('Content', 'JTable', array());
foreach ($results as $article)
{
$table->delete($article->id);
}
With this code it take about 12 hours to delete about 3k articles. Am I doing things wrong or this is just how Joomla works?
I could simply do MySQL script to delete rows in #_content, however that way many related tables would not be processed, for example, #_assets, #__ucm*, #__contenttagmap, etc.

Answer 1

12 hours is an extremely long time to delete 3k articles. I would expect it to take a minute/couple of minutes.
Try using the following to see if it makes any difference.
NOTE: Please make sure you have a backup of the database before trying this code!
$db = JFactory::getDbo();
$query = $db->getQuery(true);
$conditions = array(
'catid=14');
$query->delete('#__content');
$query->where($conditions);
$db->setQuery($query);
Hope this helps

Answer 2

You could delete 3000 articles by hand by making the filter list length 100, checking all, and then clicking the delete button 30 times. So clearly the way you are doing it is not what should be happening although basically the theory is right.
Can you please make sure that you have no asset_ids for anything but root.1 that have parent_id == 0?
Also make sure that all of the articles have properly set up asset ids i.e. make sure that they always are parented to the asset for category 14.
You should be able to use the model to delete an array. But even looping 3000 times should not take 8 hours unless you have come infinite loops that are starting over and over and triggering the failsafe for runaway loops.