Bug#137709: feature request: gzip /var/lib/apt/lists/*
On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
>
> 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.
gzip --rsyncable? :)
Reply to: