Yum is a memory pig to the tune of 3GB

[seth vidal]

On Sun, 2008-03-23 at 13:58 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> 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.

1. were you running it on x86_64 or x86?
2. How many kernels do you have installed?
3. When was the operation 3GB in size? Was it during the actual running
transaction?
4. When was the last time you've run: rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*; rpm
--rebuilddb

-sv