Repairing disk permissions takes more than a half hour?

[johnpc]

I am running snow leopard, have 8 GB RAM and 320GB hard drive

I've had the computer 5 months, and today randomly decided to "repair disk permissions" on disk utility.

Estimated time remaining is 32 mins. So far there is already a huge list of details, mostly things that are supposed to be set at 95 or 1 but are set to 0 (not sure what this means).

Is it supposed to take this long? What exactly is it fixing, and how did these problems arise from simple regular use? Will I notice a difference in my computer's speed afterwords?

 

[GGJstudios]

Yes, it can run for a while.

Mac OS X: Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions messages that you can safely ignore

About Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions feature
Repairing permissions: What you need to know

 

[Fubar1977]

GGJ`s is quite correct, it can take a while,particularly if you have never run it before.
I ran it on a whim last night (only 2nd time since owning MBP) and it took 20-30 mins although I had installed and removed a fair bit of software since last time I ran it.