Taking 5 hours to quiesce a farm?

So, this morning about 8:15am, I was shutting down one of our test sharepoint farms for a full backup and I ran

stsadm -o quiescefarm -maxduration 30

When I then ran

stsadm -o quiescefarmstatus

I got back a message saying

Farm is quiescing, and will be full Quiesced at: 12/8/2014 1:42:53 PM

I was surprised that if I were to wait until it was fully quiesced I would have to wait 5+ hours.

Is that normal?

After waiting a few minutes and continuing to see that message, I went ahead and shut down the processes so that the backup could begin.

I was just wondering if this was normal. I had not done this before in SP 2010 - in SP 2007 it seemed to only take a few minutes before things were quiet.