Why does portsdb -Uu run so long?

[Nikolas Britton]

On 2/1/06, Xn Nooby <xnooby at gmail.com> wrote:
> Since I've gone back to the "old foolproof way" of updating my system, I'm
> doing a "portsdb -Uu" again - which has always taken forever to run on my
> various machines.  Is there a way to speed it up (without replacing it), or
> has anyone looked at it to see if it needs rewriting?
>
> I worked at a place where a monthly mainframe job ran for 24 hours, and the
> whole plant had to shutdown while it ran (which wasnt too big a deal since
> it was on Sunday).  When the job started taking 36 hours to run and the
> original programmer was too busy to fix it,  they brought in a consultant to
> help.  He re-wrote the job so it ran in 15 minutes.  The original programmer
> was fired two days later.  Since then, I've always been suspicous of jobs
> that run for long periods of time.

It just does, after you cvsup new ports cd into /usr/ports and type
make fetchindex. what way is the "old foolproof way"?