Delete all files and folder working very slow - powershell

Question

I need to delete all the archived files and folder older than 15 days.
I have implemented the solution using PowerShell script but it taking more than a day to delete all files. Total size of the folder is less than 100 GB.
$StartFolder = "\\Guru\Archive\"
$deletefilesolderthan = "15"
#Get Foldernames for ForEach Loop
$SubFolders = Get-ChildItem -Path $StartFolder |
Where-Object {$_.PSIsContainer -eq "True"} |
Select-Object Name
#Loop through folders
foreach ($Subfolder in $SubFolders) {
Write-Host "Processing Folder:" $Subfolder
#For each folder recurse and delete files olders than specified number of days while the folder structure is left intact.
Get-ChildItem -Path $StartFolder$($Subfolder.name) -Include *.* -File -Recurse |
Where LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-$deletefilesolderthan) |
foreach {$_.Delete()}
#$dirs will be an array of empty directories returned after filtering and loop until until $dirs is empty while excluding "Inbound" and "Outbound" folders.
do {
$dirs = gci $StartFolder$($Subfolder.name) -Exclude Inbound,Outbound -Directory -Recurse |
Where {(gci $_.FullName).Count -eq 0} |
select -ExpandProperty FullName
$dirs | ForEach-Object {Remove-Item $_}
} while ($dirs.Count -gt 0)
}
Write-Host "Completed" -ForegroundColor Green
#Read-Host -Prompt "Press Enter to exit"
Please suggest some way to optimise the performance.

Answer 1

If you have many smaller files, the long delete time is not abnormal because it has to process each file descriptor. Some improvements can be made depending on your version; I'm going to assume you're on at least v4.
#requires -Version 4
param(
[string]
$start = '\\Guru\Archive',
[int]
$thresholdDays = 15
)
# getting the name wasn't useful. keep objects as objects
foreach ($folder in Get-ChildItem -Path $start -Directory) {
"Processing Folder: $folder"
# get all items once
$folders, $files = ($folder | Get-ChildItem -Recurse).
Where({ $_.PSIsContainer }, 'Split')
# process files
$files.Where{
$_.LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-$thresholdDays)
} | Remove-Item -Force
# process folders
$folders.Where{
$_.Name -notin 'Inbound', 'Outbound' -and
($_ | Get-ChildItem).Count -eq 0
} | Remove-Item -Force
}
"Complete!"

Answer 2

The reason why it takes so many time is that you are deleting files/folder over network which leads to need for additional network communication for every file and folder. You can easily check that fact using network analyzer. The best approach here is to use one of the method that allows to run code which executes file operations on remote machine, for example you can try to use:
WinRM
psexec (first copy code to remote machine and then execute it using psexec)
remote WMI (using CIM_Datafile)
or even adding needed task to the scheduler
I would prefer to use WinRM but psexec is also good decision (if you don't want to perform additional configuration of WinRM).