>I am looking to see if there could be a way to optimize a delete SQL I have.
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>Basically, I do something like this every 15 minutes:
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>DELETE FROM Hit WHERE AddDate<something
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>As this is executed every 15 minutes, usually, this is executed in a flash. So, all records from the Hit table which are older than the parameter will be removed. The situation is when I run this command on a test server, where this procedure hasn't been executed since a while, the process may take several minutes.
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>Is it because I am working on a date field? If yes, I can do a SQL at first to get the primary key and then remove anything older than that primary key.
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>Or, is it that it is because there are a lot of records? If this is the case, what can I do to optimize?

As I saw from the Execution plat the most part of the operation if for recreating the clustered index.
Could you try to remove the index first then DELETE and then recreate it?