Is it possible to speed up yum.

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

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