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As the title says, how long does a distribution upgrade (e.g. from 11.04 to 11.10) usually take, discounting the download phase? I've been upgrading from Natty to Oneiric, the download only takes about 1 hour, but now I've been in the "Installing the upgrades" phase for more than 5 hours already. The progress bar has been stuck saying "About 2 hours 55 minutes remaining" in the last 3 hours, and the remaining time is not decreasing. The detailed view (Terminal view) still scrolls printing stuffs that it's installing, so the upgrade is still running, albeit ever so slowly.

In short, is it normal that the Ubuntu upgrade takes this long? Fresh install, as I remember, takes about an hour or so from inserting the CD to booting to the harddisk; I had expected that an upgrade may take longer than fresh install, but not by this much.

Second question, why does it take so long to upgrade vs fresh install? Certainly not the download time, since that takes about the same time, about an hour for both fresh install and upgrade. It's the installation phase that takes so long.

The upgrade finally finished a couple of hours after I posted, I'm still not sure why it takes so long; however when debugging another (possibly) unrelated performance problem in my program (running on this same laptop), I found out that SQLite is excruciatingly slow on ext4 (in my case, a 10 second operation turns to 5 minute), because ext4 enabled write-barrier by default. The root of the slow upgrade might be the same since distribution upgrade also involves a lot of disk writes.

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  • 5 hours would be the norm for me to upgrade. and i cant go and leave it thinking it will be completed on my return...it stops to ask questions. I think this will be the last time I upgrade.
    – user68629
    Jun 5, 2012 at 20:29

3 Answers 3

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I recently hopped a server from 9.10 to 11.10 (4 separate upgrades) in a couple of hours. There was significantly less to do on each upgrade and it was downloading at a stupidly fast speed but that should give you a lower bound.

Upgrading does take longer than reinstalling. Not only do you have to download the packages but they have to extract and configure themselves, running all sorts of nonsense to ensure stability. Most installed systems tend to have more packages than a fresh install too.

But what you're going through does not sound normal. I'd watch the terminal view for a little while to make sure it's not doing the same thing over and over and over again, if it is, you might need to put together a Plan B.

If it looks like it's working properly - just leave it as long as you can bear and see what happens.

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  • The upgrade finally finishes a couple hours after I posted, I still am not sure why it takes so long; however when debugging another (possibly) unrelated performance problem in my program (running on this same laptop), I found out that sqlite is excruciatingly slow on ext4 (in my case, a 10 second operation turns to 5 minute), because ext4 enabled write-barrier by default. The root of the slow upgrade might be the same since distribution upgrade also involves a lot of disk writes.
    – Lie Ryan
    Dec 23, 2011 at 15:25
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I just upgraded from Ubuntu server 19.10 to 20.04 running on DigitalOcean with minimal resources and it took about 30 minutes.

I would just not recommend running the do-release-upgrade command via SSH.

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  • 1
    What's the alternative to do-release-upgrade using the command line? Dec 4, 2020 at 14:39
  • With DigitalOcean for example, you could use their web console. Dec 5, 2020 at 19:22
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It depends on your computer. With a fast computer it should take about 1 hour - 1 hour and 30 minutes.

12.04 ----> 12.10 1h-1h30m

12.10 ----> 13.04 1h-1h30m

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  • He said "Discounting the download phase"
    – Kupiakos
    Jun 19, 2013 at 0:56
  • @Kupiakos Most part is install. Barely any is download so well does not make too much of a change.
    – user168392
    Jun 19, 2013 at 1:10
  • @Kupiakos Everybody should watch for edits on my MAIN post
    – user168392
    Jun 19, 2013 at 1:15
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    Also, realize this question was asked in 2011, when 11.10 was the newest version. In any case, the whole "depends on your internet provider" is irrelevant in this question, as he has specified that the download phase does not matter to him in this case.
    – Kupiakos
    Jun 19, 2013 at 1:44
  • Yeah changing that to COMPUTER
    – user168392
    Jun 19, 2013 at 10:25

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