I opted to try to let man-db run longer to configure itself, but to no avail. This is on a dual-core 2GHz Athlon:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 4811 man 20 0 23100 1516 488 R 100 0.1 324:59.69 mandb -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org