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#1 2010-12-12 15:31:17

jmss
Member
From: Lisboa, Portugal
Registered: 2006-10-24
Posts: 42

pacman/yaourt too slow

Hi,

pacman/yaourt is becoming slower through the last months/years.

It performs intensive disk work before doing a -S or -Ss operation.

Before it was very fast. One of the main advantages of Arch Linux was pacman (compared to yum which was very slow).

Now yum seems to be faster (I don't use it regularly), but on the other hand pacman seems slower.

Moreover, the advantages related to why pacman is slower don't show. At least I haven't noticed any.

Do you know what's happening? Is it due to file fragmentation as I read elsewhere?

My laptop is kind of old (2006 or so) but pacman used to work *really* fast in the past. It's a 10x difference.

Thanks for any enlightening.


João M. S. Silva

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#2 2010-12-12 15:47:09

skunktrader
Member
From: Brisbane, Australia
Registered: 2010-02-14
Posts: 1,676

Re: pacman/yaourt too slow

Does running pacman-optimize improve performance?

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#3 2010-12-12 15:49:25

ngoonee
Forum Fellow
From: Between Thailand and Singapore
Registered: 2009-03-17
Posts: 7,362

Re: pacman/yaourt too slow

jmss wrote:

Hi,

pacman/yaourt is becoming slower through the last months/years.

It performs intensive disk work before doing a -S or -Ss operation.

Before it was very fast. One of the main advantages of Arch Linux was pacman (compared to yum which was very slow).

Now yum seems to be faster (I don't use it regularly), but on the other hand pacman seems slower.

Moreover, the advantages related to why pacman is slower don't show. At least I haven't noticed any.

Do you know what's happening? Is it due to file fragmentation as I read elsewhere?

My laptop is kind of old (2006 or so) but pacman used to work *really* fast in the past. It's a 10x difference.

Thanks for any enlightening.

There's quite a bit of database optimizations in the current dev version of pacman. Just wait for it.


Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.

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#4 2010-12-12 17:39:21

jmss
Member
From: Lisboa, Portugal
Registered: 2006-10-24
Posts: 42

Re: pacman/yaourt too slow

skunktrader wrote:

Does running pacman-optimize improve performance?

No. I did that, following the advice I saw in the same topic where I read it had to do with file fragmentation.


João M. S. Silva

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#5 2010-12-12 17:40:53

jmss
Member
From: Lisboa, Portugal
Registered: 2006-10-24
Posts: 42

Re: pacman/yaourt too slow

ngoonee wrote:

There's quite a bit of database optimizations in the current dev version of pacman. Just wait for it.

OK. It is strange however; such a performance degradation in what I considered by far the best package manager. Hope the dark times will pass soon.


João M. S. Silva

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#6 2010-12-15 00:50:13

jmss
Member
From: Lisboa, Portugal
Registered: 2006-10-24
Posts: 42

Re: pacman/yaourt too slow

I decided to measure the time of a system update right after rebooting:

$ time yaourt -Syu
Password:
:: Synchronizing package databases...
core is up to date
extra is up to date
community is up to date
archlinuxfr is up to date


real    1m45.049s
user    0m0.630s
sys    0m1.003s

What do you think?

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep "model name"
model name    : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.73GHz


João M. S. Silva

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#7 2010-12-15 01:03:01

thestinger
Package Maintainer (PM)
From: Toronto, Canada
Registered: 2010-01-23
Posts: 478

Re: pacman/yaourt too slow

pacman -Sy now only writes changes to the disk (since v3.4) so you end up with lots of spread out files, v3.5 will have the tar sync database so it won't be a problem

try doing pacman -Syy to fix it

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#8 2010-12-15 01:41:46

jmss
Member
From: Lisboa, Portugal
Registered: 2006-10-24
Posts: 42

Re: pacman/yaourt too slow

Hi,

I think it helped:

$ time yaourt -Syu
:: Synchronizing package databases...
core is up to date
extra is up to date
community is up to date
archlinuxfr is up to date


real    0m16.073s
user    0m0.567s
sys    0m1.053s

Thanks.


João M. S. Silva

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