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Bug#775163: marked as done (apt pigs out in /var, particularly with multi-arch)

Your message dated Mon, 12 Jan 2015 10:34:04 +0100
with message-id <20150112093404.GA12040@crossbow>
and subject line Re: Bug#775163: apt pigs out in /var, particularly with multi-arch
has caused the Debian Bug report #775163,
regarding apt pigs out in /var, particularly with multi-arch
to be marked as done.

This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.

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-- 
775163: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=775163
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--- Begin Message --- 
Package: apt
Version: 0.9.7.9+deb7u7

I've ended up examining how much space programs are using in /var, and
APT is the top pig, using close to half of /var as /var/lib/apt/lists,
one factor does appear to be exasperating this, `dpkg` has 5 foreign
architectures.

Trying a few compression methods:

426248  lists
114580  lists.gz
90868   lists.bz2
85648   lists.lzma
86532   lists.xz

Nearly all of this space is being used for the Packages files.  Merely
compressing them would be a rather major improvement.  The main Debian
testing file is the biggest of these.


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--- Begin Message --- 
Version: 1.0.9.2

On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 09:36:00AM +0100, Michael Vogt wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 09:40:20PM -0800, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> > I've ended up examining how much space programs are using in /var, and
> > APT is the top pig, using close to half of /var as /var/lib/apt/lists,
> > one factor does appear to be exasperating this, `dpkg` has 5 foreign
> > architectures.

5 architectures? That is a lot… I presume you are a heavy cross builder?

If you have repositories you don't want to get the data for a specific
architecture, consider the sources.list [arch-=]-syntax: see manpage.


> > Trying a few compression methods:
> > 
> > 426248  lists
> > 114580  lists.gz
> > 90868   lists.bz2
> > 85648   lists.lzma
> > 86532   lists.xz
> > 
> > Nearly all of this space is being used for the Packages files.  Merely
> > compressing them would be a rather major improvement.  The main Debian
> > testing file is the biggest of these.
> 
> You can use the configuration option 
> """
> Acquire::GzipIndexes "1";
> """
> to keep the indexes compressed on disk. You trade the speed for
> building the mmap cache with the size of the data on disk. 

It isn't just startup, other parts of runtime will access it to, so it
can/will be slow all around. Searching for example, but also any action
downloading a package (because of the Filename: field, among others).
It is the "price" you pay for Debian having such a huge archive. You can
freely delete the /var/cache/apt/lists directory through if you are done
working with apt for the moment. This is usually done on space
constraint embedded systems for example. Just remember to do a 'apt-get
update' before you use apt the next time and apt will recreate the
directory and its content.

(Note btw that the option mentioned above keeps the compressed files it
downloaded, so it isn't compressing the entire directory, which means
less savings - note also that some compression algorithms are more
cpu/memory/time hungry than others while they are uncompressing.)


> Note that this option works best with later apt versions (1.0.9.2 or
> later) where this option supports all compressions that apt supports
> (the older versions only support gzip).

As there isn't much else we can do about it, I am closing with that
version number.


Best regards

David Kalnischkies

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