How long is it supposed to it take for symptoms of liver failure to be present?

Can be very late: The liver is a small factory that performs many functions in the body - detoxification, processing of food, generation of proteins, modulation of blood components, etc. The liver is quite large with enormous capacity because of its importance to body function. Therefore, there is a large amount of redundancy and extra capacity present. You may lose 70-80% of function before diagnosis of failure.