Is it possible to speed up yum.

[Antonio Olivares]

--- On Tue, 6/17/08, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Is it possible to speed up yum.
> To: fedora-test-list at redhat.com
> Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2008, 10:11 AM
> On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 12:18 -0400, John Poelstra wrote:
> > Shyam said the following on 06/17/2008 12:10 PM
> Pacific Time:
> > > I've been using Fedora since fedora 6 and it
> is good to see improvements 
> > > in  yum.  When compared with ubuntu in the
> packages which is around 
> > > 25000 and fedora which has around 10000, the time
> taken to download the 
> > > package list during the refresh in ubuntu takes
> lesser time than Fedora. 
> > > Is it possible to speed this process.?
> > > 
> > > -- 
> > > Shyam
> > > 
> > 
> > Just out of curiosity... exactly what is the time
> different downloading 
> > and installing the same package set on Fedora and
> Ubuntu?
> 
> I don't know that it makes much sense to compare
> download times since in
> general the packages are coming from different servers (and
> aren't even
> the same sizes). What I do notice is that apt-get and
> friends on Ubuntu
> are much faster at resolving dependencies, so it may be
> something about
> the database implementation. For example if I do a
> "yum update" and a
> minute later do another one, yum takes a while to tell
> there's nothing
> to be done (even when using the cache), whereas apt-get is
> almost
> instantaneous.
> 
> Here's a quick comparison. Both machines are Intel Core
> 2 Duos with 2GB
> of RAM. One is Fedora 9, the other is Ubuntu Gutsy. Both
> are up to date
> with their respective repos, so no network activity is
> going on here:
> 
> Fedora:
>         # time yum update
>         Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, protectbase,
> refresh-packagekit
>         Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
>          * livna-development: mirror.atrpms.net
>          * livna: mirror.atrpms.net
>          * google: dl.google.com
>          * fedora: fedora.c3sl.ufpr.br
>          * adobe-linux-i386: linuxdownload.adobe.com
>          * localrepo:
>          * updates: ftp.usf.edu
>         0 packages excluded due to repository protections
>         Setting up Update Process
>         No Packages marked for Update
>         
>         real    0m5.376s
>         user    0m3.611s
>         sys     0m0.278s
>         
> Gutsy:
> 
>         $ time sudo apt-get upgrade
>         Reading package lists... Done
>         Building dependency tree
>         Reading state information... Done
>         0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2
> not upgraded.
>         
>         real    0m0.430s
>         user    0m0.420s
>         sys     0m0.008s
>         
> poc
> 
> -- 

This looks like an unfair comparison.  Why? you may ask?

It is simple the repos available on your fedora installation vs the ones on Ubuntu.  Does not seem that there equivalent number of repos.  Also the primary.xml.bz2???  takes too long to finsh many times after doing a
# yum clean all
# yum clean metadata
It has to query the sqlite stuff and it takes too long.  This tends not to happen on Ubuntu, am I right?  You probably do not have to refresh apt-get stuff as you might have to do on yum.  

Anyway, the behavior is hard to determine why things are the way they are.  The size of the packages matters, also the servers from where the packages are fetched is also important, which plugins are present in yum for instance, fastest mirror, presto, etc.  A one-on-one comparison does not say much since other factors kick into the equation.  

Regards,

Antonio