Re: Network installs

[Arthur Rodrigo Sawazachi Valadares <arthursv linux vnet ibm com>]

On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 09:36 +0200, Joel Andres Granados wrote:
> Hi Arthur
> 
> How much ram does this machine have? Was there a swap image in the installation?  either created or already existing?
> How many packages were installed?  I have found that doing big installations (lots of packages) with little memory or no swap or both takes very long.
> 
> Regards
> 

Hi Joel, the machine has 2 GB of RAM and 2 GB of swap created by
anaconda.
Apparently this really is usual, since some friends told me it usually
takes that long. Apparently it is yum that is taking this long and I
think it will be hard to make it more efficient. But I think we could
show a progress bar in this part (packages processed / packages to be
processed) to show the system is still running. 

Alexander's e-mail:
> It might be possible to take that long. At this stage yum is resolving
> dependencies (i think) or running rpm transaction before actual package
> installation starts. I've seen similar behavior on ia64 in the past. IIRC there
> was something about yum and memory which was causing it to run slowly. Try RHEL
> 5.2 or another architecture (32bit if possible) with the same package set and
> partitioning to see if there's change in the speed. Also try Fedora 9 which has
> newer version of yum.
> 
> - --
> Alexander.
> 
> Hi Alexander,

I used the "software development" default set of packages. After I sent
this e-mail I used VNC on the power machine to have a working console to
check logs. anaconda.log kept reporting lines like these:

14:27:38 DEBUG   : Adding Package sound-juicer - 2.16.0-3.el5.ppc in
mode u
14:27:38 DEBUG   : Member: sqlite.ppc 0-3.3.6-2 - u
14:27:42 DEBUG   : Adding Package sqlite - 3.3.6-2.ppc in mode u
14:27:42 DEBUG   : Member: audit-libs.ppc64 0-1.6.5-9.el5 - u

For a bunch of packages, so it is in fact yum that is taking this long.
For each Adding Package and Member, it took about 1-2 seconds, which is
very long for a lot of packages. I believe there is already people
working on this performance issue on the yum side, but I think that on
the anaconda side, as I mentioned above, we could make it clear to the
user that although it takes long, it eventually finishes =)

I don't have access to a RHEL 5.2, but I'll see if I can get one to see
if anything has changed. 
About the 32 bit and Fedora, I'm working on a specifically on power pcs
now, but if I develop a solution for it, I'll check if it is necessary
on X 32 and 64 machines as well..

Thanks to both of you for quick replies =)