Upgrading takes forever

[aviv_el]

I've started upgrading my forum (in a staging enviroment) from 3.8 to 5.0. I won't say it all went smoothly, but it worked reasonably well. Until, I got to the stage of upgrading to 5.0.0 alpha. There's the building of the node table. It's been way over a day, on a server pretty much dedicated to this only. My forum has 11,385,494 posts. My guess this is why it's taking so long.
As I don't want my forum held hostage for more then 3 days, just to get the upgrade done, I was wondering if there's a way to upgrade while the forum is still running. Now, I get this error, saying "There is a serious error and the page cannot be rendered" (a windows error message). Anything I can do about it?
Thanks in advance
Aviv

[final kaoss]

I have not tried vbulletin 5 and I won't. I suggest though that you repair & optimize the tables via phpmyadmin on both your vb3 db & your current vb5 db.

I also suggest that you make a post here as it might help to improve your servers performance.
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum/general/server-configuration

Actually I would suggest just regular installing of vb5 and then use impex to import the content.
You may find the download for it in your customer center on vb.com and support for it here.
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum/vbulletin-4/vbulletin-impex-import-system