Empty Trash slows down near end? Expected behavior? Fault?

I have about 50k records I’m emptying from the trash, and I’ve noticed a marked decrease in speed once about 75% of the records are done. The first 75% seemed to proceed at about 50 records per second. (The slowdown may occur earlier. It’s just what I’ve noticed coming back after some time away from the computer.) The sizes of the records don’t get much larger than perhaps 50kb, so I thought I’d check to see if this is expected behavior, or whether it’s indicative of a dbase problem.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: The records being deleted are RTFD if that matters.

That’s still quite a lot of data to flush out of the database. Probably outside the envelope for most uses. How long did the job take?