Deb manipulation = huge memory consumer
Dear apt developers,
I'm quite new to Debian (1/2 year) and I'm quite satisfied with it. Its
major problem, in my opinion, would be dpkg and apt-get (and, probably, their
friends). They consume vast quantities of memory. I ran X, LyX, Opera 5.0,
different versions of Netscape 4.x, Abiword etc... and I managed to do my job.
The problem is, a simple package installation (say "apt-get install dvisvga")
takes more than 5 minutes on my piece of junk (486 Dx2 @ 80 MHz, 16Mb ram).
The reason it is so slow is the small amount of ram available. I've turned
off my 32Mb swap partition and, after launching apt-get, processes began to
get killed by the kernel; apt-get finally died with "VM: Out of memory" or
something like that. Ok, I should change my computer, I know. The problem is,
I won't have this possibility in the close future. My question is: could
anybody look over the algorithms again, please? I can't understand why the
programs mentioned above (which do a lot of complex tasks) still manage to
run at least acceptably, whereas dpkg/apt-get don't. Are there any lighter
replacements for these? (And you should know, I'm not the only one
complaining; I've got friends with powerful computers who do it, too.)
Thank you very much for reading this. If this is not of your concern,
please be kind and forward it to whom should read it.
A. Mustatea
--
Linux user #166652 on Linux machine #73497
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