Building from source outside of macports is a breeze. Building with macports takes forever and seems to freeze the os every so often. Is this typical behavior? Although it seems like a nice packaging tool for os x, if I have to go through this pain every time during every install I think I'll do without it.
If you are running on an Intel Core 2 Duo you can double the speed of your builds by changing the Macports config option located here:
/opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf
# Number of simultaneous make jobs (commands) to use when building ports
buildmakejobs 2
I was kicking myself when I discovered this AFTER I rebuilt gcc ;)
This option will allow you to use both cpu's for building packages.