One of the most common issues I look at from day to day is some variation of the question. “Why did it take a long time for my AG/Database to failover?”. There are many different meanings for this innocuously simple looking statement, for example was it that the failover time was long or was it a long time bringing the database online, or was it that it took a long time because a failover wasn’t possible, and what *exactly* is a long time? Are we talking a long time means 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, 30 minutes? To each different business and their needs, “long” dramatically fluctuates. I’d like to go through at a high level, some of the most common reasons that I troubleshoot and if they might apply to your environment. FYI, if you tell me 1 second is a long time then I’m going to point you toward different architectures with multiple layers of caches and front-end servers/services which isn’t going to be cheap, but that’s what you want so you’re _willing_ to pay for it, right? Yeah, I thought not.
Click through for several factors which may affect how long it takes for a failover to occur.