For those who are still looking for an efficient way to bulk delete in django, here’s a possible solution:
The reason delete() may be so slow is twofold: 1) Django has to ensure cascade deleting functions properly, thus looking for foreign key references to your models; 2) Django has to handle pre and post-save signals for your models.
If you know your models don’t have cascade deleting or signals to be handled, you can accelerate this process by resorting to the private API _raw_delete as follows:
queryset._raw_delete(queryset.db)
More details in here. Please note that Django already tries to make a good handling of these events, though using the raw delete is, in many situations, much more efficient.