What's Up with John the Ripper?

Hi, A week or so ago I installed the "secchk" package. When the first weekly report came out, it included the statement "Password security checking not possible, package john not installed." So I installed this "john" package. I decided to run a manual check. That was nearly 48 hours ago and it's still running! I have a 3.0 GHz HT CPU and there are 46 lines in my /etc/shadow file. Is this normal? If so, what the hell good is this program? I can't possibly have multi-day processes running on a weekly basis. Can anybody tell me if this is to be expected? Is there a way to invoke it to make it run in a more reasonable amount of time? Thanks. Randall Schulz