The most efficient way to remove first N elements in a list?

You can use list slicing to archive your goal.

Remove the first 5 elements:

n = 5
mylist = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
newlist = mylist[n:]
print newlist

Outputs:

[6, 7, 8, 9]

Or del if you only want to use one list:

n = 5
mylist = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
del mylist[:n]
print mylist

Outputs:

[6, 7, 8, 9]