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...

-- 
Jon Peatfield,  Computer Officer,  DAMTP,  University of Cambridge
Mail:  [log in to unmask]     Web:  http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/