dpkg crawling!
I am not sure exactly when this behaviour manifested but it was within
the past 2 months or so. Now whenever I install something the dpkg
package database will eat up like 90%-100% of my CPU and the machine
is near frozen until it completes. Even installing a small single
package this will happen, when I install a lot of packages like in a
recent dist-upgrade worth 70MB my machine was in basically unusable
state for over 20 minutes until it finished!
0 upgraded, 44 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 906kB/73.4MB of archives.
After unpacking 185MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
Get:1 http://debian.mirrors.pair.com testing/main mesademos 6.2.1-1 [807kB]
Get:2 http://debian.mirrors.pair.com testing/main stx2any 1.56-2 [98.8kB]
Fetched 556kB in 2m23s (3862B/s)
Extracting templates from packages: 100%
Preconfiguring packages ...
[At this point the trouble began and my CPU jumped way up for about 3 minutes.]
Selecting previously deselected package mysql-client-5.0.
(Reading database ... 310013 files and directories currently installed.)
[This is where things got really bad and I was over 90% CPU util for
the next 17 minutes!]
Any clue what is causing such poor performance and how I can fix it?
I run Debian lenny with 2.6.18 kernel. CPU is P3 700MHz with 256MB RAM.
Zach
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