Re: dpkg

[Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org>]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2001 at 04:04:50AM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> Joey Hess wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Hmm, status file too, at about the same speed, it seems.

As it reads, it is allocating memory for, and creating a very large in
memory structure. I think it also verifies the files associated with the
package, and does some other sanity checks. IMO, about the only way to
get real speedup is for all of this data to be in a hashed database,
on disk, so all dpkg has to do is open the database and verify files.
The hash will already be avaiable. However, there are probably some
caveats to this.

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