Smart and rpm hangs

If I will to make a full upgrade via smart, with more than 1000 packages, smart uses a virtual memory size of more than 1300 MB, and locks the system If I use rpm for the upgrade (with the downloaded packages via smart), frequently it locks with the message: warning: waiting to reestablish exclusive database lock I mean that the lock comes from the proces query-system, because in the same time it uses a high cpu percent. Thanks