its taking too long to actually run a test from the time i start the test.
If you have monitoring configured in your project you should try to disable them to see if it's the issue.
For example, if you have some SQL monitors that are not available, it can take time before having a timeout.
I hope it will help you.
It is most likely because of serveral SQL variables you may have created in your neoload project. All SQL variables will be executed which will update all the underlying csv files before starting a test. So if you have so many SQL variables or a few SQLs which takes longer time to execute will cause this behavior.