I have encountered an odd problem in generating a large InDesign
index, and I'd like to know whether anyone else has experienced this.

The reference book I'm indexing is very long (about 600 pages, double
columns) and dense with personal names. I should add that I'm away
from home for the summer and am using my Toshiba Portege 4000, which
admittedly is a bit underpowered for a task like this (512 MB of RAM,
processor I think about 800 Mhz). I would expect the index generation
process to go slowly, but what happened is slightly more complicated.
When I tried to generate the index for one long chapter (with -- so
far -- 3283 index references), my Toshiba churned slowly but steadily
until it reached reference no. 2523 (in other words, about
three-fourths of the way through), and it suddenly slowed to a crawl,
thereafter processing one reference about every ten seconds.

I aborted the program and then tried to generate an index for the
entire book. Again the generation proceeded normally (but slowly)
until it got about three-fourths of the way through the references,
and once more it came to a virtual standstill. I had no choice but to
abort. At that rate it would have taken a week to complete the index.

Is this caused by insufficient memory and a slow chip, or is there
some other explanation? Will I have to buy more RAM for my desktop
computer at home when I return in September, and if so, how much do I
need? Or is it simply impractical to do such a large index in
InDesign? I've produced much smaller indexes in ID in the past, and
I've never run into this problem before.

Bill Peterson