Pacman *appears* to be slow?

zenlord · 2007-04-11 10:48:56

Hi,

I spent some time with Arch around the 071-release, and although I wanted Arch as the main OS for my small (office-)company, I couldn't find support in the neighbourhood, so I had to go for Debian.

I kept hanging around this place and yesterday I installed 0.8 via ftp on my parents main computer, and almost everything is working great: speed, stability AND up-to-date-packages! Only the XFCE-panels crashed a few times when saving something in the control panel, but now I'm using E17 as the main WM, and without any problems.

The only *real* thing that is kinda annoying is that pacman needs around 30s or more to start syncing. I chose an official mirror in my own country, and get around 700KB when downloading, which I think excludes the mirror as a cause of the slowliness. I also ran a pacman-optimize (which did nothing) and a pacman -Sc followed by a pacman-optimize (also no dice)...

I have to admit that my system is not the most recent one (AMD 1GHz with 256MB RAM), but is this pacman-behaviour normal? Can I speed it up?

THX for any help (and for a great OS)

Zl.
PS: As a relative newbie to linux, I had no problems at all installing Arch, so I don't think it should be reserved for experts...

Borosai · 2007-04-11 11:25:17

It may be the server...I'm not sure though, 30s is a lot. I had a noticeable delay with a certain server as well, but the delay was eliminated when I switched to another server. One way you can check is by browsing the repo with your web browser. If it takes a long time to open initially, it may be the server.

zenlord · 2007-04-11 12:18:25

I checked the repo, and it is very fast: ftp://ftp.belnet.be/packages/archlinux/0.8/os/i686

I'll check to see if the problem is still present this evening...

Zl.

lucke · 2007-04-11 12:55:48

Peculiar.

What is your filesystem?

pacman3 should hit the current repo not long from now, it ought to be a bit faster. Maybe it'll alleviate your problem.

-edit-

Perhaps you have disabled "lo" interface in /etc/rc.conf or don't have a proper "127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost" entry in /etc/hosts? That's a common cause of different problems.

Last edited by lucke (2007-04-11 13:04:52)

zenlord · 2007-04-11 13:32:04

1. XFS is my filesystem
2. Aha, I thought this was pacman 3 already...
3. I didn't touch the lo interface in rc.conf
4. I'll have a look at the hosts-file. I remember adding my hostname somewhere, but I don't remember exactly how I did it - I'll report back later!

THX for the replies!

Zl.

Last edited by zenlord (2007-04-11 13:32:36)

zenlord · 2007-04-11 22:20:57

I think the problem was solved by editing my hosts file. I remember adding a second '127.0.0.1'-line with my real hostname at the end without removing the first line. I fixed it and pacman seems much more responsive!

Thank you!

Zl.

Arch Linux

#1 2007-04-11 10:48:56