I don't know if I should be starting a new post for this or not.

When I've been testing the performance of my drop table statements, I've been restarting the SQL Instance before running.

My feeling here was that I didn't want any cached data to be affecting my calculations.

Interestingly, when dropping all 10,000 tables after an Instance restart, the whole process takes about 3 minutes

If I don't restart the instance, and just run the process immediately after creating the tables, they delete in about 15 seconds.

Is this discrepancy in time to be expected?

Is the process faster if the instance isn't restarted due to cached data?

Or is the process slow after the instance has been restarted due to SQL also running other startup processes?

Thanks again for your help

Steve