I upgraded my 2 Laptops to Notes 8.5.1 today. Both machines already had 8.5.1 BETA CD 8 installed.
Upgrading from 8.5.1 Beta CD8 to 8.5.1 Gold took about 95 minutes on one machine. There was a lot of disk activity during the upgrade process. The progress bar moved slowly but steady.
On the other machine, I decided to uninstall the client prior to upgrading. On this machine, it took only 15 minutes to install the client.
I’ve had the same issues where the upgrade from 8.5 to 8.5.1 have taken up to 45 minutes. I’ve also noticed the “smart” upgrade isn’t working as well.
It installs a lot quicker if the jvm.properties file has been tuned.
see http://www.google.com/search?q=lotus+jvm.properties
Note that commonly, the Xms parameter is forgotten. The speedup is a lot better if min and max heap are the same (if you can afford to set aside the memory). My hypothesis is that a lot of the speedup comes from not having to grow the heap, and a lot less garbage collecting. Also, a lot of the heap lives in virtual memory, i.e. is allocated, not used in physical memory until used.
for me, 1024 works like a dream:
vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx1024m
vmarg.Xms=-Xms1024m
I just search the notes directory for jvm.properties, since the location varies between the different versions of 8.x.x
Note: heap size > physical memory = problems. For me, even with ample memory, heap size > 1700 also equals problems.
Cheers and good luck.