I have been using Batik, a java based SVG package to verify, pretty print, and convert a large set of SVG images to PNG's

Recently this process has slowed down by a couple magnitudes and I am at a loss as to why this has happened. It seems to be a problem with Java.

Before the performance hit occured The process took about 20 minutes on my 800 Mhz Linux box, not it is so slow that I have to do it on my windows box. This is very disruptive to my development process.

I had been allowing Redhat to do automatic updates on the box. Now I'm thinking of going back to Slakware where setup was a lot of work but I knew what was going on.

Ideas?