Deleting millions of rows in MySQL

Question

I recently found and fixed a bug in a site I was working on that resulted in millions of duplicate rows of data in a table that will be quite large even without them (still

Answer 1

Here's the recommended practice:

rows_affected = 0
do {
 rows_affected = do_query(
   "DELETE FROM messages WHERE created < DATE_SUB(NOW(),INTERVAL 3 MONTH)
   LIMIT 10000"
 )
} while rows_affected > 0

Deleting 10,000 rows at a time is typically a large enough task to make each query efficient, and a short enough task to minimize the impact on the server4 (transactional storage engines might benefit from smaller transactions). It might also be a good idea to add some sleep time between the DELETE statements to spread the load over time and reduce the amount of time locks are held.

Reference MySQL High Performance