Is it normal for env open to take more than a minute?

Question

I'm relatively newbie to bdb. I'm using the python bindings to the berkeley db, and the call to dbenv.open takes an inordinate amount of time (in the order of minutes). Granted, my program has very large transactions, but all have been committed in the previous invocation of the program.
Can it be something that I do incorrectly when shutting down the application? Or, if this is normal behavior, can I at least do something to move the delay from application starting to the (previous) application termination (which would be much more tolerable)?

Answer 1

I use it from python (i.e., through the bsddb library). Here's the code for opening:
self.dbenv = db.DBEnv()
self.dbenv.set_cachesize(0,100*1024*1024)
self.dbenv.set_lk_max_locks(20000)
self.dbenv.set_lk_max_objects(20000)
self.dbenv.set_lk_detect(db.DB_LOCK_DEFAULT)
self.dbenv.set_flags(db.DB_LOG_AUTOREMOVE, True)
self.dbenv.open(self.__dbenv_dir(), db.DB_RECOVER| db.DB_CREATE |db.DB_INIT_TXN| db.DB_INIT_MPOOL| db.DB_INIT_LOCK|db.DB_THREAD)
I thought that some of the parameters might be excessive. However, the problem does not occur with an empty db, only when it becomes very large (currently it takes 800M on the disk).
The closing is, I think, standard - I just call close on all the databases and on the dbenv. There are no error messages during the closing.