CUNY Academic Commons

It's likely that the delay is due to the size of the upload directory on historyprogram.gc.cuny.edu. It appears that the site has amassed over 1.4G of uploads over the years.

As such, I don't think that this is a problem that will happen with most sites, which use a far more modest amount of space.

I like the idea of moving some parts of the clone process to background/async processes. This wouldn't make the process faster, but it would eliminate the delay after submitting the creation form. The setup steps would take place over the next few pageloads, and by the time the admin visited the site for the first time (say, 30 seconds later), the process would, in almost all cases, be finished. But this change would take a lot of technical work, and would also require some design thought about how to inform users about the potential delay in setup. So it's a project I'd prefer to tackle only when we've heard extensive reports of problems.

Just out of curiosity, is there a way for me to see what's big (and old)?

No, sadly, I don't think there is. You could page back on https://historyprogram.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/upload.php to find old stuff, but there's no simple way to see what's large. For the moment, we don't have a cap on site storage on the Commons, so it shouldn't be a huge issue. But if you get to a point where you need to clean up for some reason, I can help to identify the largest files on the system.

For now, I'm going to close this out.