Re: Bug#137709: feature request: gzip /var/lib/apt/lists/*
On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Adam Heath wrote:
> On a performance note, dpkg has support for reading status/available, either
> with mmap, or with block reads(apt only uses mmap). My performance testing
> showed the difference in speed, with a sufficiently large block size, was just
> noise.
It doesn't mmap, it just random-seeks. It doesn't load the package files
at all, only the portions of records it needs when it needs them. The
shear amount of data in the package files make it infeasible to load them
all at once into ram. That is why the memory footprint is so very small,
which is far more important on older systems than disk usage.
It is possible to store them compressed but it would have to use a
non-standard compression scheme to allow random seeking to still work.
Jason
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