[GRASS5] data import question

[David Piasecki]

I have 42 jpg files with corresponding jgw world files totaling 65MB to 
import into GRASS at any given time. I'm using r.in.gdal to import this 
data, which takes about 6 minutes and splits each of these files into 
their RGB components. Then I merge the raster data with r.patch 
input=image0.red,image1.red,...,image42.red output=map.red and so on 
for green and blue. When all is said and done, the image size is 
roughly 15000 x 13000 pixels. Then I create a composite image with 
r.composite and output the whole thing to a PNG or TIFF file using 
r.out.png or r.out.tiff. I'm not sure how fast r.composite will run 
because r.patch is still only 70% of the way through green, and I've 
been running this for the past 45 minutes. Does anyone know of a faster 
way to merge these images together? As it stands, this will run for 
more than an hour for only 65MB of data. This is way too slow for our 
purposes and for most people's sanity. I read that GRASS stores its 
raster data compressed and that compressed data may execute faster when 
the disk would otherwise be accessed a lot, but would it run faster if 
the images were uncompressed with r.compress -u? I've searched around 
some, and I haven't found any commands that might be faster, but if 
anyone has any suggestions on how to speed up this process, I'd be 
happy to hear them.

Thanks,
David