Yum is a memory pig to the tune of 3GB

[Bruno Wolff III]

Today I was running a yum (yum-3.2.13) update that pulled in something on
the order of 50 packages (though there are about 5000 installed) and noticed
it was running pretty slow. So I took a look using top and saw it had
a virtual size of 3GB which seems excessive. The resident size was around
600MB. Based on the slowness, I am guessing that the memory was being used
in a way that was resulting in paging despite 600MB being only around 30%
of memory. (The machine is a dual core Xeon with 2GB of memory and a couple
of sata disks using encryption on top op of raid.)

I like some of the features of yum, but it can really be a pig at times.
Since I have mirrors of the repo locally, running rpm -Fvh *.rpm is going
to run faster and will work when packages dependencies haven't changed.