v.support VERY slow

[Jacinda M. Barbehenn]

Considering that L.A. County is THE largest County in the TIGER/Line
file, you should expect that v.support (even on a fast machine) will
take a while (a long while).  In general v.support on a TIGER ".Master"
file for a county will take about 1/4 to 1/3 longer to run then 
v.in.tiger of the same county.

If you are not interested in using the RIM DBMS that is assoicated with
the 4.0 version of GRASS in TIGER, there is a post 4.0 version of TIGER
and Census programs in GRASS available on the GRASS ftp site,
moon.cecer.army.mil. This version of the TIGER in GRASS extracts user
specified data from the TIGER/Line files and creates GRASS maplayers
of that data, for instance roads, township boundaries, water features,
landmarks, etc.  These programs takes, a most, minutes to process.


>> The subject is really:
>> v.support is very slow even on a Sparc 2 on files derived
>> from Los Angeles County TIGER Files....
>> 
>> I imported the Los Angeles County TIGER file with v.in.tiger
>> then ran v.support. The tutorial for "TIGER in GRASS" warns that
>> this may take up to several hours, but it has taken nearly 48
>> hours and it's still not done.
>> 
>> System Configuration:
>> Sparc 2, 48MB RAM, Plenty of disk space.
>> Running under OpenWindows
>> 
>> It wrote the file la.Master after about 30 hours in the dig_att
>> directory.
>> 
>> What I really want to know is whether this is normal for huge 
>> (e.g. 65MB for type 1) TIGER files or if something has gone 
>> awry. I'm a new GRASS user and we just got GRASS running here
>> so there may be some problems with our configuration.....
>> Any advice on this will be greatly appreciated.

-Jacinda Barbehenn
 USACERL/UI GISLAB
 mountz at murphy.gis.uiuc.edu