Deleting large volume of players/staff in the pre-game editor

[podunkboy]

Trying to wipe out the players in a database, but if I select more than 500 players at a time, the editor either 1. takes 45 minutes/hour to delete the selected players or 2. locks up and nothing gets deleted. Since there's hundreds of thousands of players in the database, doing them 500 at a time would take...forever, and I'm a very busy man. Last year, when I had a 10-year-old laptop with only 4 GB of ram, there wasn't a problem deleting 1000 at a crack, now with a new laptop with 16 gB ram and dedicated on-board graphics...might as well delete them with a rubber eraser. And tips/suggestions?

[Wolf_pd]

There are about 500K, so that would take a while.

Best way I have seen the deletion work is by starting a file, delete everything and only then save. The delete and save gets a lot slower when you delete, save to file and then delete again. Do you want only players, or also non-players deleted?

[krlenjushka]

If you have UIDs - i can create script so you can delete all players you need in 2 mins.

[podunkboy]

5 hours ago, Wolf_pd said:

There are about 500K, so that would take a while.

Best way I have seen the deletion work is by starting a file, delete everything and only then save. The delete and save gets a lot slower when you delete, save to file and then delete again. Do you want only players, or also non-players deleted?

Well, it's not the saving of the database that takes so long, that's almost instantaneous, and I don't want it to crash and lose my progress. I'm just deleting the players for now, because that's already enough work. (And yes, I understand that I'm destroying all the work those world-wide scouts have put in to give us that robust of a database, and I certainly play saves with all players intact, but sometimes it's fun a load up a blank slate and let the game create an entirely new world.) 

[podunkboy]

Found a database from FM 22 that was a player-wipe, when I loaded it up in FM 23 it still showed about 50K players (probably new additions to FM 23) I just set the max results to 5K, highlight them all, click delete and wait about 2 hours. Should have the thing done in about a week. 

[Wolf_pd]

Interesting still, I mean, I did a little test to see if my editor had a similar performance issue and while it took a while to delete 10K players per delete, I managed to do 100K in a hour while I was working (so not every delete was right after the previous finished).