Why is rpm -qa | grep openoffice.org2 soooo slow?

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005, Rodd Clarkson wrote:

> I repeat... Why is rpm -qa | grep openoffice.org2 soooo slow?
>
> It eventually turns out some output, but it takes the better part of a
> couple of minutes (very subjective, but I managed to talk to my wife
> about something and then type this email and it still isn't finished, so
> it's a reasonable amount of time.)  Actually a couple of minutes is
> bloody generous.
>
> After waiting so long i decided to do a real test, so here it is...
>
> [rodd at localhost database]$ time rpm -qa | grep openoffice.org2
> openoffice.org2-impress-1.9.77-1
> openoffice.org2-core-1.9.77-1
> openoffice.org2-xsltfilter-1.9.77-1
> openoffice.org2-writer-1.9.77-1
> openoffice.org2-graphicfilter-1.9.77-1
>
> real    6m28.496s
> user    0m3.070s
> sys     0m0.559s
> [rodd at localhost database]$

Well, that depends on the overall system speed, number of installed 
packages etc. A real killer for rpm query performance is the number of 
verifications rpm does by default - on my laptop:

time rpm -qa > /dev/null

real    0m5.131s
user    0m4.900s
sys     0m0.110s

...but disabling signature checks makes it go waaay faster:
time rpm -qa --nodigest --nosignature > /dev/null

real    0m0.513s
user    0m0.260s
sys     0m0.160s

 	- Panu -