Editor crashes with out of memory when upgrading materials for hdrp

Editor crashed during the update that I initiated from the hd render pipeline wizard after the editor got through the "initial asset database refresh" where I had to add 200GB of virtual memory due to it crashing when I added hdrp to the project (took 3hrs). When I loaded a scene, all models were either pink or looked weird, so I followed advice to enter the wizard and click "Upgrade Project material to hd materials". The editor crashed again with out of memory, saying it tried to allocate 264GB of memory. Is there a way to make this less painful, it takes a very long time for it to run (6hrs+) and it is unclear whether it is going to crash or not. Can this be run in batches instead? And why does it have to load all assets/materials in the project? Seems like a bug. Not sure if it is going through all assets again when I kicked off the upgrade a second time after going to 400GB of virtual memory... Wish me luck... Please fix this...