portupgrade and index

[dave]

Hello,
    I've got a box that runs portupgrade to keep the most current ports.
I've lately switched to make fetchindex vs. portsdb -uU which goes much
faster. My problem is whenever i do a make search for a port the index.5
file is regenerated and that takes an extremely long time. I was wondering
if this is normal behavior, and what if anything i could do to speed it up?
Thanks.
Dave.