iTunes Match: Setting Up

Currently, I have my school iTunes library on an external hard drive that I carry back and forth between school and home. It works, but it's kind of a pain to be sure I have it with me all the time. I have it backed up in two other places just in case it gets lost. I've been considering iTunes Match since I first learned about it a couple of months ago. Today I decided to give it a try. I'm sure most of you have an extensive library as I do. Currently I have 9516 songs (and I know I'm missing A LOT of my Music K-8 songs that still need to be imported). I was wondering how long this process would take and it is proving to be lengthy. I started at about 4:30 this afternoon. About an hour later, I checked the process and discovered that it was stuck on Step 2 at about a third of the way through. I clicked stop and restart and it seemed to solve the problem. By 7:30, it had completed Step 2 and found only 1556 matches in the iTunes store. That means it needs to upload all the rest of my 8034 songs to "the cloud." I really hope the process is complete by the time I wake up tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.