Today snapshotting of filecoin state into a CAR file from lotus node takes 2.5 hours on a 256 GB RAM machine. This is the bottleneck for proviing snapshots. The other phases are SHA256 hashing (10 minutes) S3 upload (20 minutes).
This snapshotting time is even in the presense of significant hardware resources -- 256 G RAM + 64 G Swap. Filecoin snapshots are smaller than this today. Latest snapshot shows ~120 G for snapshot size: ipfs://bafybeia5wm3jpf4nviu66w5sz3gu3xcmtwmsasswoar2bnupu3t5wdyl6y/
It should be possible to reduce lotus snapshotting time to the same order as other steps and remove the bottleneck. A nice feature of the proposed approach to do this is that it should interoperate well with forest snapshot generation and potentially speed that up significantly as well