portupgrade running slower than before?

[John Cholewa]

I started "portupgrade -ra" on my home mail server (FreeBSD 
5.2.1-RELEASE) two or three hours ago.  It says "[Updating the pkgdb 
<format:bdb1_btree> in /var/db/pkg ... - 246 packages found (-0 +1) . 
done]", and the output hasn't changed since.  For much of this time, 
ruby18 has been using 90% of my system's resources.  It's obviously 
doing *something*, but I can't see any ironclad progress in terms of 
packages being updated.

As recently as a few weeks ago, running this same thing would start 
installing programs within minutes at most.  The only major change that 
I've made in the past couple weeks is getting rid of stale 
dependencies.  Most of these were caused by XFree86-Libraries (staled as 
xorg-libraries), so I just uninstalled and reinstalled (from ports, 
naturally) X.

Anyway, is this normal?  Should I set my machine to upgrade to 
FreeBSD-5.3 or something like that?  I did a "cvsup ports-supfile && 
portsdb -uU" the other day.  Should I do anything following that?

Thanks in advance.  :)

--
  -JC