using --remove-older-than takes a very long time?

HI,

I've been running backups on my servers for a long time using
rdiff-backup.  My backup server has been offline for about a week and I
just put it back online yesterday.  The server does the following:

foreach host (list of machines to backup); do
  rdiff-backup host local-storage-for-host
  rdiff-backup --force --remove-older-than 1Y local-storage-for-host
end

This process starts at 1am.  I noticed today (it's not 8am) that the
remove process for the first server started at 4:09am and is still
running.  In other words, the "clear history" process is taking longer
than the backup did!

Is this expected behavior?

While I keep track of how long it takes to run the backup process for
each server, I didnt separate out the backup vs cleanup stages of the
process.  If cleanup is going to take so long, I might separate it out
into a different stage!  Although it would be nice if cleanup could be
sped up!

Is there any way to profile the code to see where it is spending its
time?

Thanks,

-derek

PS: I should mention this is with 1.2.8, not a more recent version.

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       [email protected]             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant