Re: aptitude "initialising package status" takes _really_ long
On Tue, Jul 03, 2007 at 11:17:04AM -0700, Alan Ianson wrote:
> >> at the start of aptitude and after every action you have took,
> >> aptitude
> >has
> >> to initialise its package status. This is the same step as "loading
> >cache".
> >> Yesterday I have updated aptitude to . Since then this step takes
> >> _really_ long. Lets say 40s. I am on sid. There is
> >no
> >> output it any loggs
>
> >
> >I have the same problem (also running sid). There is a bugreport by
> >me relating to this behaviour.
> >
> >Maybe it will be fixed soon.
>
> I get the same thing on my amd64 box, on my laptop it takes about
> forever.. :) I saw on the bts that it is caused by some new feature
> of apt, tags or something. I suspect it will be fixed soon.
>
> I guess we'll never take aptitude for granted again. :))
I first noticed this when I took my 486 from Woody to Sarge. It seemed
to be a combination of far more packages and more 'features' that
aptitude keeps track of. It went from 10 seconds to about 3 minutes.
With Etch (after some shell-gameing with the drive to get it installed),
its gone to several minutes. Since aptitude puts all that database in
memory, the poor 486 ends up thrashing its swap.
On my PII, aptitude takes about 40 seconds and takes up most memory but
doesn't hit swap much.
On my Athlon64 running amd64 it takes about 1.5 seconds.
[begin rant]
I could just write it off as feature-bloat (like a browser) but its
central to keeping a debian system up-to-date. (yes I know, I could just
use apt-get but that still takes a long time, as does dselect). But
then again, the designers of debian and linux in general are focused
more on making new hardware work so that the new apps will work and are
less interested in providing a system that works with ancient hardware.
[end rant]
Doug.
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