# Hl.export\_plink taking too long

**URL:** <https://discuss.hail.is/t/hl-export-plink-taking-too-long/4112>\
**Category:** Hail Query & hailctl\
**Created:** [April 23, 2025, 8:57pm UTC](https://discuss.hail.is/t/hl-export-plink-taking-too-long/4112 "2025-04-23T20:57:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Jing\_Zhang](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discuss.hail.is/jing_zhang/32/1274_2.png) [@Jing\_Zhang](https://discuss.hail.is/u/Jing_Zhang)\
**Post date:** [April 23, 2025, 8:57pm UTC](https://discuss.hail.is/t/hl-export-plink-taking-too-long/4112/1 "2025-04-23T20:57:57Z")

</div>

Hi,

I have a plink binary file (.bed,.bim,.fam) that is on GRCh38 and I am trying to use hail to liftover it to GRCh37. The .bed file is about 25GB. There are 71267 samples and 1414695 variants.

I used `mt = hl.methods.import_plink()` to read in the plink file. After the liftover is done, I was using `hl.export_plink()` to export the lifted mt back to plink binary file. It has been 4 hours but the exporting step is still running without generating any output. There is no error message. But there is one INFO:

2025-04-23 16:42:22 Hail: INFO: Ordering unsorted dataset with network shuffle.

I really appreciate your input here. Thank you very much!