Thank you, that solved the issue !
(odly enough i check for swapping issues, but it didn't seem to  use it, must have 
overlooked it)

> On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, Killian De Volder wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>>
>> Since a certain point in time (i'm afraid I do not recall what 
>> triggered it),
>> yum is slow. Not slow as in ... lets wait, 5 or even 20 mins. But 
>> longer...
>> I don't even know how long it takes ... that's how slow it is.
>>
>> I'm not sure how I can begin to debug or resolve this issue ? Any 
>> advise ?
>> (64mb ram, 23MB/Sec hdparm speed, yum version 2.4.3)
> 
> Try adding more memory!
> 
> At some point we discovered that the sl5 installations we were doing 
> just stalled on machines with < 768M ram.  These are kickstart installs 
> where we were pointing at two repos:
> 
>   the base sl50 repo (well our local mirror of it)
> 
>   an additional repo containing *all* sl50 security updates plus our local
>    packages
> 
> At some point the total number of available packages causes the anaconda 
> (using the yum code!) to need rather more memory than was available.
> 
> (during install there is no swap and some memory is already taken by the 
> initrd and tmpfs stuff).
> 
> When we first started using this kickstart setup with sl50 384M was 
> enough (though pretty slow), and since little else has changed so I 
> assume that it is a problem with the number of available packages that 
> the yum code has to check.
> 
> Oddly enough the installer gets as far as starting the actual 
> installation but then after a few hundered packages gets 'stuck'.  
> Switching to a text VC shows that anaconda is swapping furiously and we 
> have loads of disk i/o but no useful progress.
> 
> A machine with ~512M ram installed at a time before there were so many 
> updates doesn't seem to have a big problem with doing yum updates but 
> that may simply be that it doesn't have so much memory stolen by initrd 
> etc.
> 
> We are about to globally update to sl51 which may help simply because 
> there are (currently) fewer security updates...
>