registry.db getting rather obese (> 600MB) and updates very slow. Anything to do?

[Ken Cunningham]

On one of my systems, 10.5 PPC, things are taking a long time when uninstalling a port - like 4-5 minutes of heavy tcl interpreter use.

The registry.db is pretty huge:

$ ls -la
total 1286264
drwxr-xr-x     7 root  admin        238 21 Jun 11:06 .
drwxr-xr-x@   15 root  admin        510 18 Dec  2018 ..
-rw-r--r--     1 root  admin          0 21 Jun 10:59 .registry.lock
-rw-rw-r--     1 root  admin          0  1 Oct  2015 .turd_MacPorts
drwxr-xr-x  2954 root  admin     100436 21 Jun 10:59 portfiles
drwxr-xr-x   185 root  admin       6290 13 Jun 19:51 portgroups
-rw-r--r--     1 root  admin  658564096 21 Jun 11:06 registry.db


As you can see, this install has been going along for 5 years, so I guess some bitrot could occur. I’m sure I could blow out the installation and start fresh, but that’s not terribly trivial on 10.5 PPC with no functional buildbot. 

Is there something else I can do to put that registry.db on a diet?

Thanks,

Ken