Re: Reducing apt's memory footprint (on small boxes)
On Monday, February 15, 2021, Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 14, 2021 at 2:53 PM Paul Wise wrote:
>
>> I think that this could be useful to a subset of Debian users,
>> possibly including embedded hardware and low-RAM cloud/VPS users.
>
> This could also be useful to bandwidth-constrained environments,
indeed! doesn't backports split into different archives anyway? and fedora has splits by general category.
still, the moment all archives are added the problem returns.
> the
> apt package indices are really quite large these days.
not being funny or anything: i appreciate the dependencies have to be kept exceptionally low, but why is noone thinking in terms of modifications to apt that do not require the package indices to be in-memory?
surely the long-term solution is to use a minimalist database or suitable key-value store, even if that involves running a conversion routine so that the current index file(s) can be distributed as-is?
i remember having live-running x86 systems 15 years ago that i could not upgrade because this was a problem even back then. surely it has occurred to someone that whatever reductions are done now by splitting archives will only stave off inevitable increases that will hit once again in a few years?
it may even turn out to be the case that using a minimalist database or key-value store actually *speeds up* package lookups and saves time even on systems with larger amounts of memory.
options i would be investigating would be sqlite, datadraw and lmdb.
l.
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