RE: Updating a single resource, it very much depends on the resource! For example, DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters take about 5-7 minutes to start up. Pulumi waits for the cluster to enter a ready state before returning (to confirm the cluster started successfully). Other resources might come up a lot faster. For example, GitHub Repos have much lower latency. It really depends on the cloud provider, and what the cloud provider is doing behind the scenes. I would expect resources like compute instances, and managed databases to take minutes to come up. I would expect resources like S3 buckets, SQS queues, and other "mostly logical" resources to become available within seconds.

how would I check how big my statefile is?

The “Checkpoint diff” feature is automatically enabled after a certain file size. I forget what the number is… The default algorithm sends the entire statefile after every resource update. The diffing algorithm calculates the textual diff of the state and sends only that, so it’s better one bigger statefiles. It only recently left the experimental phase.

Chatting with the team, the diffing algorithm automatically kicks in after 1MB. Unfortunately, you can't set the threshold any lower. So you should see improved perf after the 1MB mark, but nothing to be done before that. You can still SKIP_CHECKPOINTS or share a program trace.