Q: Trash can wont empty quickly enough

It has been two days now I have been trying to empty my trash bin but it is taking forever.  At this rate it will take a week to empty.  I updated to Yosemity and I have 4 gigs or ram running on a mac mini with 500gigs hard disk.  It is not even close to being half way done yet.  There must be something I can do to get this thing back to the way it is suppose to be.  Does anyone have any ideas of what I should do.  I have re-format the hard drive but when I put all my software back on it, it does the same thing again.  Was running OS X 10.9 before and it was doing it with that as well.