Questions on mirroring RIPE

In preparation for getting a RIPE mirror running at APNIC, I copied a copy
of the RIPE database and started the loader scripts on this. That was 73
hours ago and we're still on the first pass through. At this stage the
logfile recording the load is 182592742 bytes long and the the directory
holding the MySQL database is 1063916 Kbytes in size.

Will this job finish within the next week, month, year...?

Since we're running the RPSL code I took the snapshot from
/ripe/dbase3/snapshot. Was that a good call?

Would an alternative option for priming a v3 server be to make a
compressed snapshot of the MySQL database and remove the need to load the
raw data into the MySQL database via the server?

I suspect the machine we're using is too small for the task - any
recommendations on minimum configurations? Should we give up until we've
got a bigger machine or RIPE staff do the promised spring clean of the
data (or both)?

Answers appreciated.

andy