It should not take much time at all (~2 mins max for a job this size is my guess).

Our platform hasn’t processed jobs all day today - I suggest submitting a ticket to support and checking your other background jobs.

It depends on how may jobs are running and the sizes of those jobs...ex: we have an instance that syncs with Salesforce every 15 min so any adhoc background jobs tend to have to be squeezed in between those syncs so they take a little longer...generally and under normal circumstances your jobs should not take 5 hours...did you check the results to see if the job is actually be applied? Perhaps it’s stalled. You can try aborting the job and staring it again.

Yeah, like @lrnlab its a little complicated to give exact times, and depending on how many admins and power users you have running jobs, the queue becomes an important thing to keep an eye on. That being said there are definitely some other processes that run and can block one of these jobs from running for a period of time, all in attempts to mitigate system resources and keep everyone up in the cloud running along, but 5 hours is on the edge where I would be seeing if anything else is getting processed and if not, opening a support call asap otherwise it will clear on its own (I find most of these blocks clear naturally in 12-14 hours) and they tend not to be able to troubleshoot to prevent in the future then.

There is an open issue with background jobs right now. I just stopped in to see if there had been any progress posted and am now sad to be the one telling you this. Open a support ticket as soon as possible so it can be attached to this issue and hopefully it gets resolved soon.

My initial job was at the processing status for over 5 hours; this being my first background job ever I was clueless on what to expect. 

I did follow @lrnlab suggestion to just cancel and retry.  This time it did execute almost instantly!

Thank you all!!

BTW, how buggy will you say background jobs are?  Scale 1 to 10, 1 the least 10 the most .  I know software and bugs go hand-in-hand, I am curious to harness you experience thus far.

Ha, I think the answer to that is that the inconsistency is inconsistent, they are fine until they are not, and then they are fine again :)

Wouldnt it be consistently inconsistent?

So, about the time this was posted, our region had a roadblock on background jobs. All jobs were stalled for me, and I think many others. Support released a fix, then I had to cancel my pending jobs and restart them for them to work. (Ticket 256138 for reference).

@GeorgeK You may have just had the misfortune of trying this at the wrong time.

*edit* @gr33n3 Just saw you also noted the same thing! Sorry for duplicating you. :)