Emacs hangs when deleting a large portion of text in a large file

[Michael Mueller]

I often use emacs to examine large log files (may be 10 MB). Sometimes I want 
to extract
a part of such a file for further investigation, for example, I am in the middle
of the file and want to delete the rest. When I just jump to the end and then 
delete the
region using C-W, emacs hangs. I assume emacs has problems saving such a large 
portion
of text in the kill ring and it would come back if I would wait for some 
minutes or maybe
hours, which I don't want to do. Even C-g won't interupt this. The only thing I 
can do
is kill emacs from the shell.

Is there a way to delete large portions of text from large files quickly?

Thanks

Michael