Preprocessing step taking a long time

I am running DeepSpeech (0.3) on google colab. My whole dataset consists of 30000 files and training set contains ~22000 files. The preprocessing step is taking a lot time. Preprocessing the training set took 2+ hours and still did not complete.

The training file specifications are:

Sample Rate: 16000
Channel: 1
Encoding: 16 bit signed Integer PCM

Dataset folder structure is as follows:

dataset
     wav
          audio_file1.wav
          audio_file2.wav
          ...............

Previously, I trained with ~1500 audio files and Preprocessing completed in seconds. So, I can’t figure out the issue here. What might be the issue other than colab?

Processing 1500 files in how many seconds, on the same hardware ? You have a 34 factor in size of your dataset, with 52000 files to process.

I think I posted a bit too prematurely. The problem was with Google Colab. Retrying some more times solved this issue.