On Thu, 20 Jun 2019 at 20:37, Michael D. Setzer II <mikes@guam.net> wrote:
Have a notebook that I had installed Fedora on some time ago.
Have upgraded it via DNF a few times, but this time I actually was watching it
versus just coming back later to find it done.
The clean installation only took about 20 minutes originally, but I've added a
lot of things to it. Showed about 5000 packages.
Download was fine with about 5.3G, and then the upgrade reboot.
It showed 9999 items, with the installation of the new packages, and the
cleanup of the  old, and finally the verify complete.
Ended up taking just over 12 hours?
Just wondering why the process took so long.
Is that normal??

No.  You should consider a failing disk and/or CPU throttling
due to cooling problems.

At my former work (now retired) we went through a period
where laptop drives got very slow and eventually failed.  Our
workloads were disk intensive, so disks often failed within the
warranty period (and getting a warranty replacement from some
big-name vendors could be a Monty Python dead disk sketch).

There were various tools to monitor S.M.A.R.T status, these
usually gave some indication that a drive was going downhill.
IT just bought boxes of new drives and replaced them when users
complained about slow systems (a new drive cost less than
the man-hours needed to file a warranty replacement claims, not
to mention lost time for user waiting on the replacement).

We also had a batch of thinkpads that collected dust in the CPU
heatsink and would slow down when they got hot.  It was not hard
to open them up and clean out the dust with canned air.  There
may be tools to display some info about temps or CPU speeds,
but users knew when the laptops felt "feverish".

--
George N. White III