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Best Practices for Salesforce Sandbox Creation and Refresh Times
Although Salesforce can’t speed up the process of creating or refreshing sandboxes, these strategies can help you to minimize sandbox copy times.
Salesforce sandboxes are designed to provide isolated environments for development, testing, and training without affecting the production environment. The creation process involves copying data and metadata from the production environment, which can be time-consuming depending on the size and complexity of the data.
Why Salesforce Can’t Speed Up Sandbox Creation
Several factors affect sandbox copy times.
- Shared infrastructure: Because multiple orgs use the same underlying resources, sandbox copies can be throttled based on the load on the system. The process of creating a sandbox involves significant backend operations, including data copying and environment setup. Additionally, sandbox copy and setup resources are lower priority than synchronous changes occurring within sandbox environments.
- Sandbox creation queue: Salesforce allocates resources for sandbox creation based on a queue system to manage demand and ensure fair usage across all customers. Sandboxes are processed in a first-in-first-out (FIFO) manner, so your position in the queue affects when the copy is started.
- Relative demand: Demand for sandboxes peaks during Salesforce release transitions, which causes contention for sandbox resources (sandbox queue and system load).
- Size and complexity of data: Larger orgs with a high degree of customization, for example, more relationships between objects, take longer to copy.
When is Quick Create or Quick Clone Used?
If you’re creating a Full sandbox from a production org hosted on a Hyperforce instance, your sandbox is created using the Quick Create technology by default. If you're cloning a Developer, Developer Pro, Partial, or Full sandbox hosted on a Hyperforce instance, your sandbox is cloned using the Quick Clone technology by default. The Quick Create and Quick Clone methods create or clone your sandbox faster than the legacy methods.
However, because of resource limitations within the shared infrastructure, sandbox creation or cloning on Hyperforce instances can sometimes default to the legacy methods, rather than the faster Quick Create or Quick Clone methods. Salesforce Customer Support can’t override the method used for your sandbox.
Best Practices for Sandbox Creation or Refresh
While Salesforce Customer Support can't expedite the sandbox creation process, you have several options that can help.
- Plan ahead and refresh as early as possible: Sandboxes aren’t guaranteed to complete by a certain time, so refreshing early means your sandbox is ready before it’s needed. You can refresh early and choose to activate later if you want to continue using the existing sandbox.
- Distribute timing of refreshes: Sandbox requests are processed in a first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue. We use different queues for different sizes of sandboxes, but two requests of the same type will back up behind each other.
- Update sandboxes instead of refreshing: An alternate option to refreshing is to update a sandbox using Metadata API or Bulk API so that you’re minimizing the updates to what you truly need.
- If you’re creating or cloning a sandbox on a non-Hyperforce instance, reduce the data copied to a minimal set using Sandbox Templates. The more data that is copied, the longer the refresh time.
Note To check if your production org is on Hyperforce, go to the Sandbox list page within Setup and check for the Hyperforce badge.
