Huge system slowdown while installing ports

[Haravikk]

I've actually always experienced this with Mac Ports, and I'm afraid I'm not sure what version I first tried, but when installing ports I often find that my system really crawls along at a snail's pace. Today I've spent nearly 13 hours installing the wine-devel port, even though kernel tasks (which I assume is the relevant process) has never gone beyond 15% CPU utilisation, yet light web surfing in Safari is sluggish, jerky, and sometimes unresponsive.

This is particularly annoying as I have an 8-core Mac Pro! There's plenty of CPU power remaining for other tasks, yet there's a bottleneck occurring somewhere because of MacPorts.

What I'd be interested in knowing is if there is anything I can do to debug and find whether this is occurring because of a conflict (besides turning things on and off please!) or how I might prevent it from happening.

I mean, is this occurring because everything is running under kernel tasks? If so, then is there a way to run it as its own independent process? I run MacPorts as root to ensure smooth installation, but I expect the bulk of the work could easily occur without root permissions, and without having anything to do with the kernel. Is this something I can change or a problem with MacPorts?

Not that this inconveniences me often, but I suspect that the pitiful CPU utilisation is why the ports take forever to build, and because they take forever to build my machine is slow for longer... well it's a vicious cycle, and it'd be nice if port updates could be snappier if it's at all possible =)

I'm using the latest MacPorts on OS X.6.4.

Thanks!
- Haravikk