Over the coarse of a tournament, 1 extra minute per match can easily add up to extra HOURS of tournament time. It looks small at first, but larger in practice.
Adding total hours to a tournament can be helped tremendously by having extra setups. Numbercrunching to follow assumes: Everyone shows up to their round on time, each round starts sequentially (I add 1 minute to the total round time to make the round length reflect setup), each round goes to time but doesn't go to tiebreaker, each set is played to its maximum length.
2s6m with one minute downtime
A 30-person tournament takes either 58 or 59 sets (depending on bracket reset in grand finals), of which 3-4 are Bo5.
A Bo3 set takes 21 minutes, and a bo5 set takes 35 minutes. Total tournament hours: Roughly 21 hours 40 minutes
Simple rulechanges at a worst-case scenario:
Bo3 takes 27 minutes, Bo5 takes 45 minutes. 28% increase in time required.
Estimated 27 hours 45 minutes total tournament hours.
Let's assume something slightly less than a worst case scenario. Let's assume that no match ever goes to time, but all sets go to maximum. Thus, new assumptions are:
2s6m match lasts for 4 minutes plus setup, 5 minutes total. Each Bo3 lasts 15 minutes, Bo5 lasts 25 minutes.
3s8m match lasts for 5 minutes (this is the higher end of the estimated time difference), plus setup, 6 minutes total. Each Bo3 lasts 18 minutes, Bo5 lasts 30 minutes.
(Please note that I think both these estimates are
high, but since certain matchups go long and others don't, we'll use this for calculation)
Now a 2s6m tournament takes 15 hours, and 3s8m takes 18.5 hours.
However, this assumes we're running a
single string (or setup, queue, thread, core, however your studies prefer to grasp a process). This number is divided across the number of setups to estimate the total time a tournament would take.
A 2s6m tournament under the "long but not worst-case" assumptions above, on three setups, takes approximately 5 hours to run to completion. The 3s8m takes a bit over 6 hours.
If you add just one more setup to the 3/6 tournament, and everything else is run exactly as assumed, you're looking at around 4.5 hours.
One setup.
The key is to multithread (or multitask or multiqueue) to the appropriate level to make as many different processes run as possible. Of course, this is harder when setups are limited due to a small or unwilling community.
However, this also results in the tournament being longer because
more Smash is being played. Assuming your tournament exists so that people can play Smash, this is what we call "value-added time." Contrast people being late to matches, coaching, fingerwarmers, and so many other things that are "non-value-added" time.
In other words, if you adjust setup count appropriately, you can have slightly longer (and in my opinion, for other reasons, better) matches, for comparable runtime.
Don't blame stock count for things running over when it's the easiest thing to fix.