Reducing Fedora memory footprint?

[Gilboa Davara]

On Thu, 2006-11-23 at 18:04 +0100, Leszek Matok wrote:
> Dnia 23-11-2006, czw o godzinie 17:30 +0200, Gilboa Davara napisał(a):
> > yum is slower by an order of magnitude than apt-get
> 
> > Am I the only one having this problem?
> Well, on this machine, yum -C update takes 14-18 seconds and apt-get
> dist-upgrade takes 9-11 seconds to resolve everything and ask me if I
> want to download. At this point, yum takes 7 MiB of memory (ps's SZ),
> while apt-get takes 30 MiB (more precisely, apt-shell takes 6,8 to
> resolve dependencies, but 30 when you tell it to commit). I still prefer
> apt for lots of other reasons, but nowadays it's not so much faster and
> doesn't look lighter at all.
> 
> Lam

I'll be the first one to admit that my information is subjective and
lacking.
But here's a small test [1] I just conducted on my workstation (2Sx2Cx4G
machine) which has Debian guest running under vmware-server. (Be aware
that the guest is limited to 512MB and uses two VCPUs)

Step0:
Get all the recent updates for both OS. (yum -C -y update [FC6 host];
apt-get -y update && apt-get -y dist-upgade [Debian guest])

Test1:
Measure the time it takes to run a clean update cycle (Read: no
downloads required, minimal network interaction).

Test2:
Measure the time it takes to search one package. (Again from cache)

Look at the numbers below:
Test1:
Network enabled "apt-get update; apt-get -y dist-upgrade" is twice as
fast as cache based "yum -C update".
Test2:
Cache bases "apt-cache search" is >20 times  faster then cache based
"yum -c search".

Again, be aware that the host machine is considerably (?) faster then
the guest machine.

As I said before, I'm not trying to start a flame war - I trying to
raise a point. God knows I won't switch to Debian just because I find
yum to be slower and resources intensive.

- Gilboa

[1] Actual test result.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FC6/x86_64 Host:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[root at gilboa-work-dev gilboa]# time yum -C -y update
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Loading "fastestmirror" plugin
Loading "fedorakmod" plugin
Loading "kernel-module" plugin
Loading "skip-broken" plugin
Setting up Update Process
Setting up repositories
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
Reading repository metadata in from local files
No Packages marked for Update/Obsoletion

real    0m6.072s
user    0m1.408s
sys     0m0.232s

[root at gilboa-work-dev gilboa]# yum -C search kdeartwork
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Loading "fastestmirror" plugin
Loading "fedorakmod" plugin
Loading "kernel-module" plugin
Loading "skip-broken" plugin
Setting up repositories
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
Reading repository metadata in from local files

[SNIP]

real    0m12.829s
user    0m7.364s
sys     0m1.104s


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian guest:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
root at gilboa-vmw-probe ~# time (apt-get update && apt-get -y
dist-upgrade)
Get:1 http://mirror.hamakor.org.il etch Release.gpg [378B]
Hit http://mirror.hamakor.org.il etch Release
Hit http://mirror.hamakor.org.il etch/main Packages/DiffIndex
Hit http://mirror.hamakor.org.il etch/main Sources/DiffIndex
Get:2 http://security.debian.org etch/updates Release.gpg [189B]
Hit http://security.debian.org etch/updates Release
Ign http://security.debian.org etch/updates/main Packages/DiffIndex
Ign http://security.debian.org etch/updates/main Sources/DiffIndex
Hit http://security.debian.org etch/updates/main Packages
Hit http://security.debian.org etch/updates/main Sources
Fetched 2B in 2s (1B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

real    0m3.078s
user    0m0.556s
sys     0m0.512s

root at gilboa-vmw-probe ~# time apt-cache search kdeartwork
kdeartwork - themes, styles and more from the official KDE release
kdeartwork-dbg - debugging symbols for kdeartwork
kdeartwork-emoticons - emoticon collections for KDE chat clients
kdeartwork-misc - various multimedia goodies released with KDE
kdeartwork-style - widget styles released with KDE
kdeartwork-theme-icon - icon themes released with KDE
kdeartwork-theme-window - window decoration themes released with KDE
kdewallpapers - wallpapers released with KDE
kscreensaver - additional screen savers released with KDE
kscreensaver-xsavers - KDE hooks for standard xscreensavers
kworldclock - earth watcher for KDE

real    0m0.314s
user    0m0.292s
sys     0m0.020s