Another piece of information is that now the admin site is generally slow, and when I try to update a page I get "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading."

I noticed a post from you on why you have so many pages i.e. you create one for each new news article. I would highly recommend you consider changing to a module that uses it's own tables - adding pages adds overhead as each has its own set of entries in multiple tables (as you've seen), and this impacts the system as a whole. Whilst DotNetNuke can run fine with many thousands of pages, you do need the database hardware to support that. Occasionally I see people using a page-model as they want to control the URL (to make it friendly) but this is not necessary e.g. take a look at the blog module and you'll see it uses it's own blog table but still supports friendly urls.

As to your question, you can use the tabcontroller.deletetab methods (there are a few overloads based on whether youre deleting hierarchys) - these will delete the pages and clean up -some of the data is cleaned up automatically by foreign key constraints but other parts (tabmodules and contentiems) are cleaned up within those methods.

Please note, if you delete a lot of pages you may want to clean down your eventlog (i.e. truncate table eventlog) as page deletes are a logged item (actually if you're suffering performance issues currently you probably want to clear that down as errors are logged also and a large eventlog can slow admin actions down)

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