How long does Upgrade-SPSite takes to upgrade a site collection?

Question

I am testing upgrade of a site collection to SharePoint 2013. The size of the content database is 225 GB. It has only one site collection.

This is a double hop upgrade. I have upgraded SP2007 sitecollection to SP2010 first.

On SP 2013 the Upgrade-SPSite is running now for 4 days and only 75% is completed.

The database is already cleaned up for document versions and audit log (clean up done in SP2007). The database is also shrinked (in SP 2007).

I analyzed the site upgrade log file to find the elapsed time for various activities.

The process is trying to upgrade 5688 sub sites in the site collection.

For the initial sub sites, the elapsed time is ~20 to 30 seconds. However as the upgrade is progressing the elapsed time is increasing for each subsite to 2 to 3 minutes.

The biggest difference in execution time is for following steps

1. Provisioning the Design Gallery in site

Provisioning the Design Gallery in site: << URL of a subsite>>

[SPTree Value=SPSite Url= added to dependency cache by lookup
[SPTree Value=SPSite Url= added to dependency cache by lookup
[SPTree Value=SPSite Url= added to dependency cache by lookup
End Upgrade()
Begin Commit()
End Commit()
Begin Dispose()
End Dispose()
SQL Query Count=48
SPRequest Objects=19
Execution Time=678.875806841372

Provisioning the Design Gallery in site: <>
[SPTree Value=SPSite Url= added to dependency cache by lookup
[SPTree Value=SPSite Url= added to dependency cache by lookup
[SPTree Value=SPSite Url= added to dependency cache by lookup
End Upgrade()
Begin Commit()
End Commit()
Begin Dispose()
End Dispose()
SQL Query Count=58
SPRequest Objects=1348
Execution Time=26429.550543435

2. Provisioning oslo.preview file in site

Provisioning oslo.preview file in site: nontoxic Site Url: << url of the subsite>>

Successfully provisioned oslo preview master page into the master page gallery.
End Upgrade()
Begin Commit()
End Commit()
Begin Dispose()
End Dispose()
SQL Query Count=6
SPRequest Objects=0
Execution Time=177.670346370838

Provisioning oslo.preview file in site: hortprac Site Url: << Url of the subsite>>
Successfully provisioned oslo preview master page into the master page gallery.
End Upgrade()
Begin Commit()
End Commit()
Begin Dispose()
End Dispose()
SQL Query Count=15
SPRequest Objects=1330
Execution Time=33145.8395550272

Answer 1

We upgraded one of our 225GB content databases in roughly 4 hours so 4 days is excessive. What this actually sounds like is that one of the servers in the mix is running into severe resource issues and is having to swap to disk a lot more than it should. I'd check all the servers in the farm including the SQL server and make sure that they have adequate free disk space and sufficient RAM. It is also possible that you are running into a server quota set at some point, either on CPU, RAM or disk space.

If your shop is like many these days, it is possible that the SQL data files are also hosted on a SAN and an improper setting there could easily cause this behavior.