Re: dpkg

[Adam Heath <doogie@debian.org>]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Joey Hess wrote:

> 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.

Also, on low-memory machines(<= 24m), dpkg goes into 'smallmem' mode, in an
attempt to take less memory, and to locally memory access.

However, in my testing, I found that largemem mode took the same footprint as
smallmem(a patch to the largemem path a few years ago changed this), and that
walking the internal smallmem structures can take a good amount of time on
slow machines.

In cvs, smallmem code has been removed.