p5-FreeBSD-Portindex usage

[Joshua Tinnin]

I have installed p5-FreeBSD-Portindex on two machines running 
5.3-RELEASE-p2, one of which is my workstation and another a laptop 
used for network monitoring and misc functions. The workstation has a 
2GHz AthlonXP, 1GB DDR and relatively fast IDE drives, so it's 
installed there more as a convenience and curiosity, while the laptop 
is a 300MHz PII with 128MB and a ~6GB HDD - I'm using it on that box 
with the idea that making INDEX wouldn't be so time-consuming, as with 
that hardware it normally takes a while. I have noticed that regular 
usage of cache-update and portindex don't particularly speed up things, 
especially on the PII, and specifically with the generation of the 
INDEX file. I run cache-init once a week in a cron job, but even if 
it's just been run the time involved in INDEX generation is the same 
(anecdotally - haven't timed it, but I haven't noticed any difference). 
This is what I'm doing:

# cache-update -i /path/to/cvsup.out
# portindex -o /usr/ports/INDEX

Note that I run this as described here: 
http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/portindex/ , except for the fact that 
I run cache-update as root (as well as cache-init), though AFAIK that 
shouldn't affect the time involved negatively. I am wondering if I'm 
doing something wrong, as you say on your site, "Steps (iii) and (iv) 
[cache-update and portindex] together should take a minute or so — more 
if one of the commonly included Makefiles 
like /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.gnome.mk has been modified." This is never true 
for me - it takes easily as long as make INDEX or portsdb -Uu, which is 
to say 20 minutes or longer, up to an hour (sometimes more) on the 
laptop. Pilot error ... ?

- jt