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jac

Member

From: /home/jac

Registered: 2009-05-19

Posts: 431

Website

Cache-ing Pacman db

I have quite a few basic questions. After I boot up, when I first do anything like searching through the pacman db the command takes a while to execute. I'm thinking from my reading that this is because no part of the db is loaded yet, so it goes through it and caches it to RAM at the same time, so that the next pacman command will run faster. I'm wondering wehther or not that is accurate. Also, there isn't something special pacman does other than access it, right? If that's true, what is the best way to have pacman go through the entire db? I tried a "pacman -Ql pacman" and saw testdb, but it doesn't have any info in any man page I could find, and the help message isn't very helpful. By running it, will it have the same result of cache-ing the entire db?
I know that if I change the fs type of /var it could definitely run faster; right now it is ext4, but I'm wondering if there is a simpler way. My idea was to just append

pacman -Ss initscripts &> /dev/null &

to the end of rc.local, and hope that that will cache the db. I tried a testdb run, but it just exited. I think that is probably due to it already being cached and not having any errors, though. Is there a better way than this that I'm just completely missing?

I'm going to reboot now, and see if I try and run a command real quick if it'll actually be fast or not. Thanks in advance.

Edit: Well, that didn't seem to speed it up much, if at all. When I get some more time I'll restart some more and use time to see what the exact difference is.

Last edited by jac (2010-01-17 15:20:18)

anonymous_user

Member

Registered: 2009-08-28

Posts: 3,059

Re: Cache-ing Pacman db

Try using pacman-cage:

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=32483
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=20385