Is it possible to speed up yum.

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 12:41:21PM -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> 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

That's not an equivalent command. An equivalent would be

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

yum refreshes its metadata every time it is run.

Regards,
R.

-- 
Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski <rathann*at*icm.edu.pl>  |  LAN  Staff
Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling
Warsaw University  |  http://www.icm.edu.pl  |  tel. +48 (22) 5540810