upgrade to FC5 on a dell inspirion 8000 takes a very long time

[Garrett Mitchener]

Hi, I upgraded my old laptop from FC4 to FC5 this weekend.  It's a dell
inspiron 8000 from 2002, with 256M ram and an 800 MHz CPU.  I used the
graphical installation using an external USB hard disk with ISO images.  It
took over 24 hours -- I haven't determined the exact time.  The hard drive
was active pretty much the entire time.  While it was actually installing
packages it seemed to go pretty quickly, but every so often it would pop up
a window about preparing an RPM transacation.  Each one of those took
hours.  I used the shell on one of the other consoles to peek at what it was
doing.  The CPU was pretty bored, usually around 2% usage according to top.
The USB hard drive was also not the bottleneck -- I watched the light and it
showed no activity most of the time.  The memory was pretty much full and it
used about 256M out of 500M of swap space the whole time.  I've upgraded
this particular machine from RH 7.0 to 7.2 to 9, then to FC 1, 2, 3, and 4,
and each upgrade seems to take longer.  The last time I upgraded, it took
overnight, but this business of taking over 24 hours is just getting crazy.
The only thing I can think of is that the hard drive isn't exactly fast and
RPM or ananconda or whatever was handling the packages must have been
thrashing.  (I've also had some trouble with RPM -- one of its databases
might be corrupted and rpm --rebuilddb didn't fix it.)  Has anyone else run
into this problem?  Is it just a slow hard drive?  Is there something wrong
(as in inefficient) with these huge RPM transactions?  I have some data that
I got out of ps and /proc while the upgrade was running and I can post them
later if anyone thinks it might help.

I would really like to figure out what's going on -- One of the advantages
that linux has always had over windows is that it doesn't force old hardware
into obsolecense as fast, but I'm now worried that upgrading this machine
next time just won't be possible.

Thanks in advance,
-- Garrett Mitchener
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