RPM needs to go on a diet.

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005, Sam Varshavchik wrote:

> I decided to clean up some old crud.
>
> # rpm -e kernel-2.6.6-1.435.2.1 kernel-2.6.6-1.435.2.3 kernel-2.6.8-1.521 
> kernel-2.6.7-1.494.2.2 kernel-2.6.9-1.3_FC2 kernel-2.6.9-1.6_FC2 
> kernel-2.6.9-1.11_FC2
>
> I was watching this with top(1).
>
> This command took six minutes to complete, with rpm taking up 100% CPU for 
> six minutes straight.
>
> Yes, these are large packages that are being removed.  No, even with all 
> that, taking six minutes, a dual Opteron box, with SCSI RAID, is 
> unreasonable.

The kernel package runs hardlink on /lib/modules/*/build/ in %post to save 
space on FC2 and FC3, that's what's taking so long when installing and 
removing kernels. That's no longer the case on devel tree kernels where 
the headers have been split out to separate kernel-devel package for those 
who need it. Kernel-devel still does the hardlink, but that doesn't 
affect nearly as many people.

 	- Panu -