[Debian-uk] Request for help speeding up dpkg

[Dan Hatton]

I'm having a problem installing Debian 3.0; when dpkg, called either
from the install option in dselect's menu, or directly from the
command line with <dpkg --install /path/to/some/random/package.deb>,
tries to unpack packages, it's extremely slow.  It seems to unpack
packages in chunks of about 17 packages (from dselect; from the
command line, of course, the chunk is of one package.)  For each chunk
of 17 packages, it spends ~35 minutes reading its database, then ~10
minutes actually unpacking the packages.  This gives an installation
rate of ~23 packages/hour, which means that it will take roughly 6
days from now to finish the ~3300 packages left to install.  I
understand that this is not normal behaviour.  Information that might
be relevant (thanks to Steve McIntyre for sharpening up my thinking on
this) is

I am using apt as the acquisition source in dselect.

apt's source, in turn, is a single DVD-ROM.

The hard disc is being accessed throughout the `Reading database'
phase.

My machine has 64MB of RAM and a 1GB swap partition.

Things were not this bad in the early stages, but have been this bad
through at least the last 1000 of the ~5000 packages that I have
installed so far, leading me to suspect that an installed package that
intervenes in the installation process in some way is causing the
delay.  The packages seem to be installing in alphabetical order, give
or take dependencies, and the problems started somewhere around
lg-issue47.  Therefore, if this suspicion is correct, we're probably
looking for a package named /^l[a-g].*/.

Please can anyone help me to speed things up?

Thanks

Dan Hatton