dpkg

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

I've been running (testing's) dpkg on a low memory 486/33 a lot lately.
Poor me. Anyway, it seems to take dpkg about 5 minutes to print
*anything*, then in relatively short order, it reads the database, and
is off to installing the package. 

I straced it during the mysterious pause, and find it is reading what
looks like the available file, one 16k block at a time, with each block
taking almost 1 second to read on my 486.

It's a 486, but it shouldn't be that slow. Is this a known performance
problem, or should I look into it?

-- 
see shy jo