Speed-up compiling

[Michael Käppler]

Hi all,
I'm "suffering" from enormous compiling durations on large files. With 
"large" I mean a file with about 250 measures and seven staves per 
system. The last time I compiled the file completely (without using 
showLastLength) I did it overnight, since after one and a half hour 
Lilypond still was "Preformatting graphical elements..." (Don't know 
what's the correct term in the english version)
I know that's my laptop is way too old to do such complex task quickly - 
(Athlon XP 2600, 256MB Ram, OpenSUSE 11.1) but are there general 
suggestions which help to speed up the compiling process?

Regards,
Michael