Delete statement in SQL is very slow

Question

I have statements like this that are timing out:

DELETE FROM [table] WHERE [COL] IN ( \'1\', \'2\', \'6\', \'12\', \'24\', \'7\', \'3\', \'5\')

Answer 1

As an extension to Andomar's answer, above, I had a scenario where the first 700,000,000 records (of ~1.2 billion) processed very quickly, with chunks of 25,000 records processing per second (roughly). But, then it starting taking 15 minutes to do a batch of 25,000. I reduced the chunk size down to 5,000 records and it went back to its previous speed. I'm not certain what internal threshold I hit, but the fix was to reduce the number of records, further, to regain the speed.