What may cause a long publish time

• The once a month image generation process. This process cleans up older images that are no longer being used in your store and the result will reduce the amount of time that it may take to publish your store at other times. However, when this process is running, it may cause a longer than usual publish time. This process is not scheduled for a certain time as it is based off your recent publishing.
• Generally, publish times are based on the amount of objects in the store template. The more complex a template design is the longer a store may take to publish. Adding a large amount of items and sections may also contribute. Developers from our Developer Network will be able to assist you with options to speed up publishes.
• Corrupted files or running out of memory may also contribute to a long publish time, but these cases are rare.

Recommended

• Rather than doing a full publish during business hours, schedule a recurring publish overnight or after business hours. This will eliminate long publish times during the day when you may need to make changes in the Store Editor. When a scheduled publish begins, it will put a halt to Editor processes and free up memory for large store publishes. It will also free up single page publish slots as there is a limit of 100 IDs per single page publish between full publishes. Note: The memory will free up after 30 minutes of no Store Editor, Catalog Manager, and Catalog API activity. To prevent a possible failed publish, it's important to make sure that there is no activity in these three areas around the scheduled publish time. The scheduled publish may never start if there is activity within the 30 minute mark. If doing a manual publish, cease all activity in these three areas 30 minutes before publishing.
• Sometimes a publish will appear to be stuck. However, if you are able to view the publish status page, it's almost always generating pages and sending them to the server and submitting images to our Content Distribution Network. If the publish was longer than usual, contact support within three days after the publish. Support can determine the top objects which require the most time to publish. However, this can only be looked into after a full publish. The data can be very useful if you work with a developer from our Developer Network.

Not recommended

• Although support has an option to manually stop all Editor processes and publishing, it's recommended to let a long publish finish and not to request a stop. If the store is currently in the once a month image generation process, the process will start all over again when you publish again. This will most likely result in another long publish time.