why is /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb taking forever?

I am not much of a GUI user --- I have to write "fun" unix programs to manipulate data. so, the old Unix underpinning are reasonably important to me. this includes `find` and `updatedb`

Is the original apple macos `/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb` broken? I just ran it and after a few hours, it had still not finished.

upon ctrl-c'ing it, it seems always to return with a message about the /var/folders arena:

```

rmdir: /var/folders/r7/y8wcwzk11rd86y2hl9f706940000gn/T//locatewaJFWVQmB7: No such file or directory

```

I wonder whether this is related to the fact that a `df | wc` tells me that I have 203 filesystems, most of which seem to be a TimeMachine.

I probably can go to the `brew` version of gnu findutils if it is broken, but then I have the confusion of having one set that is broken on the system and that want to use the same config etc. files. and, unfortunately, just having tried this anyway, the gnu findutils are also not working --- perhaps due to a default configuration that doesn't work on macos.