Why does portsdb -Uu run so long?

[Xn Nooby]

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.