CREATE INDEX is sooo slow! any ideas?

[david]

Hi

I have one table with 12 million records.   I'm trying to create an index 
on one of the fields and it's taking hours ( over 6 so far)!  Am I doing 
something wrong?

The command I issued was
create index title on article ( title);

  The table files are
-rwxrwxrwx    1 mysql    mysql        8646 Feb 14 17:32 article.frm
-rwxrwxrwx    1 mysql    mysql   1406663720 Feb 14 23:27 article.MYD
-rwxrwxrwx    1 mysql    mysql   69661696 Feb 14 23:27 article.MYI

As you can see the main file is 1.4Gb

The table definition is
mysql> show columns from article;
+-----------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field     | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-----------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| ID    | bigint(20)   | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| id2       | bigint(20)   | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| title     | varchar(250) | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| body      | text         | YES  | MUL | NULL    |       |
+-----------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

I'm running this on linux redhat 7.3,  P500Mhz 512Mb ram  -- MySQL version 
3.23.53a

Thanks
David