Deleting journals from a multi-journal instance

Description of issue or problem I’m having:
Deleting a large journal (with ~9k submissions) seems to never complete.

Steps I took leading up to the issue:
Backed up and stood up the multi-journal database into a “dev” instance. Logged in, went to the administrative interface and clicked to “remove” the journal. The modal to confirm popped up and I then clicked “OK” to confirm. The dialog does not disappear and after waiting overnight (just to be sure I wasn’t being impatient), it still had not completed.

What I tried to resolve the issue:
Some of the other journals in the instance properly deleted and the modal box closed and the page refreshed to reflect that the journal had been removed (despite this, I do still see records for those journals in the database still, however, the main record for the database in the journals table is no longer present). I’ve tried waiting longer, but I think that the timeout is being reached. Is there another method other than the GUI that I can use to approach this to split this multi-journal instance into multiple single-journal instances?

Application Version - e.g., OJS 3.1.2:
OJS 3.3.0-6

Additional information, such as screenshots and error log messages if applicable:
No errors seem to crop up.

Hi there,

You may speed up the process by removing the submission files from the “files_dir” before deleting the Journal in OJS.

Please, be careful. Dealing with the file system might be tricky. Don’t forge to make backups prior to any change, just in case.

This is with no files in the files_dir … this is from a re-staged instance built from a backup.

I have bumped up the max_execution_time to ‘0’ (unlimited). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This makes it run… but produces a new set of problems… Closing this thread in favor of a new thread focused on the new errors.