Site Very Unresponsive After Achieve Request

I'm trying to reduce the size of my site and spotted that 2020 was using 90GB, yet when I asked it to store on S3 it showed 0 to be sent over.

So I selected the archive request and now when I try and navigate I either get 

504 gateway timeout  

or a service unavailable dir to maintenance or capacity issue

yet logging into Plesk the Cpu is at 3% and memory 2% with little disk activity - the site is hosted on a dedicated server

I should also add that I did this 3 days ago and it's no better the Plesk file manager is showing that the 2020 folder is still holding 89gb space

The delete queue is probably running. Go to any page in the admin other than the homepage, like the main settings page. Upper right corner of the white area of the page you will see a delete queue working. You can click the pause option to pause while you are working in the admin then uncheck and leave it open in a tab when you are done. 

Only you will experience the slow response of the site when the delete queue is running. You can test by visiting the site in another browser or device.

Thanks for the rapid reply Tim - 

yes the delete is still running, does it continue to run 24/7 ? or do I need to keep the a page open

You will need to leave the page open for it to run.

Tim,
With 88gb still to go, if I delete the folder directly on the server via the plesk file manager will it screw things up big time

It shouldn't screw things up.

Ok, I'll leave it running as long as possible then review in the morning

I did it 1 year ago by deleting 200GB directly from ftp and I had no problems. then I calmly deleted the pages from the sityst web admin