during the smartstore conversion process, do the excess copies get evicted as they are uploaded, or is that done at the end?
Starting ing splunk 7.3.1 splunk ensures that bucket copies are not evicted on target indexers after the hot bucket rolls to warm and is uploaded by source.
However for buckets that are already warm and that are being converted to s2 and are being uploaded by either the source or the targets, they would not be evicted on upload irrespective of the version.
buckets would only be evicted eventually when there is cache pressure ( cache is full).