Sorry for the delay. If you delete a rom the gamelist won't be changed. EmulationStation does have some code to filter out ROMs that no longer exist but I'm not sure now this effects the memory usage. 

Did you scrape using my scraper? If so and you are worried, you could rerun it. It will still re-download all the metadata but image won't be touched. This effectively trims down the gamelist at the cost of a few MB of data and time.

So, after adding thousands of roms and scraping many of them... My interface has become a bit laggy and boot times have suffered.  I'd like to go through and delete some of the roms and/or scrapes to resolve this.  My question is:

If I delete a rom, will it automatically remove the scraped information and adjust the gamelist.xml?  Or do I have to manually delete those entries as well?

QUESTION: gamelist.xml, scraper & boot times