Is it possible to speed up yum.

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 10:28 +0200, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> 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.

It doesn't. It refreshes it if metadata_expire seconds (defined
in /etc/yum.conf) have elapsed since the last time it was run. Since I
deliberately updated both systems just before running the test, there
was no network activity. This is explained in the post.

poc