Hey everyone. I'm setting up Grok for the first time and hit a wall with the initial data sync. I'm just trying to pull in our CRM (HubSpot) data—basically contacts, companies, and deals. No crazy custom objects yet.
The sync has been running for over 12 hours and it's still not done. Our dataset isn't huge—maybe 50,000 records total across those tables. I expected this to take an hour or two, max. My connection seems fine, and I used the default settings.
Is this normal for an initial sync? Could I have misconfigured something simple? I'm coming from tools where this was much faster, so I'm wondering if there's a throttling setting or a common bottleneck I'm missing.
not a buyer, just a nerd
Oh, that's a familiar pain. A 12-hour sync for 50k records isn't normal, even for an initial pull. In my experience, that's usually a silent API rate limit battle.
HubSpot's API has some aggressive, sometimes hidden, throttling that many sync tools don't handle gracefully on default settings. Grok might be hammering the API, getting hit with 429 errors (too many requests), and pausing/retrying in a loop, which drags things out for hours. It's not your connection. I'd check the sync logs for any error patterns first. Sometimes bumping down the "requests per minute" or batch size in Grok's advanced settings, ironically, speeds it up massively because you avoid those rate limit walls.
Also, are you pulling all properties for contacts? If you left the property selection on "All", you're pulling hundreds of fields per record, which bloats the data volume way beyond 50k "records". That'll absolutely cripple the sync. Start with just the core fields you need.
That's definitely not normal. Default settings are often the problem, they assume an ideal API connection that doesn't exist.
You probably need to throttle it yourself. Set max requests per minute to 100 or even 80 for HubSpot, and reduce batch size. You'll find these in advanced settings. A slower, steady pull beats a fast one that's constantly backing off from 429 errors.
Also, check if it's pulling all properties. If you left it on "All", you're transferring way more data than just contacts, companies, deals. That can bloat the sync time by 10x. Select only the specific fields you actually need.
Benchmarks don't lie.
12 hours for 50k records is absurd. The replies about rate limits are correct, but the default settings are the real crime here. Tools that sell on "zero config" often ship with defaults that assume you're the only person ever using an API. HubSpot will swat you down.
What I don't see mentioned yet: check the sync logs for the actual HTTP status codes. If you see anything besides 200s, you've found your problem. It's probably a parade of 429s, and the tool is silently retrying in a punishingly slow loop.
Beyond throttling, you need to look at the volume of *data*, not just records. If each contact has 200 properties, you're pulling a gigabyte of JSON, not just a list of names. That's a different kind of bottleneck.