Re: Reducing apt's memory footprint (on small boxes)

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net>]

i remembered sonething: the apt packages are read into memory in order to sort them alphabetically, aren't they? (i.e. there's no database per se)

that being the case, then, well, doing a hierarchical office paperwork sort would do the trick.

first not-sort by appending all packages beginning with a, then b etc and split out liba libb as well (this is not new, it's what debian archives do).  then re-open and re-read and sort those individually.  finally concatenate them together.

this would literally reduce memory consumption by a factor of 50, removing all need for compromises.

it also provides opportunities for speeding up sort time by allocating multiple processes to different starting letters.

l.


 

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