Solved Why does Disk Cleanup take so long?

This Windows niggle has been annoying me for years so not just Windows 11. For a while now I have had SSD storage so there should be no slowness that HDDs can suffer from.
Example -
Today using File Explorer I deleted numerous files totalling 3.47GB file in 2 seconds but Disk Cleanup took about 5 min 30 seconds to delete 2.33GB.

I know Microsoft are deprecating 'Disk Cleanup' in favour of 'Storage / Cleanup recommendations' and maybe it is a long standing, well-known Windows Disk Cleanup gripe that Microsoft never fixed but I'd be interested to hear if others find the same.

wiganken said:

I know Microsoft are deprecating 'Disk Cleanup' in favour of 'Storage / Cleanup recommendations' and maybe it is a long standing, well-known Windows Disk Cleanup gripe that Microsoft never fixed but I'd be interested to hear if others find the same.

Click to expand...

There is one function in Disk Clean up that is necessarily very slow, that is the Windows Update Clean up. And it doesn't matter how you start it, in Disk Clean up, through Storage, or using DISM from the command line - they all end up calling the same process to do the actual work: the Windows Modules Installer: TIWorker.exe.

Cleaning up windows updates is slow because it's not just a matter of deleting files. The Windows component store contains a lot of hard links that need to be resolved.

As you have mentioned, it is an outdated tool. Yesterday I terminated it after 2 hours.

Also there are normally a lot of compressed files in the component store, Windows doesn't just delete them, it has to first decompress, selectively delete, then re compress any remaining files. This I believe is what takes the longest time to perform.

Thanks for the explanations. They go a long way towards removing my frustration now that I know just how much Disk Cleanup is doing when it runs.

I noticed that as said earlier it is a slow process, but after changing from HDD to SDD it is so much quicker, even then it is still slow