Yum is a memory pig to the tune of 3GB

[seth vidal]

On Sun, 2008-03-23 at 22:44 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 18:49:11 -0400,
>   seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > 
> > 1. were you running it on x86_64 or x86?
> 
> x86_64
> 
> > 2. How many kernels do you have installed?
> 
> I had two installed before hand and it was installing a new one and removing
> an old one in that update.
> 
> > 3. When was the operation 3GB in size? Was it during the actual running
> > transaction?
> 
> The running transaction message had been displayed, but no messages for
> an individual package had been displayed yet.
> 
> > 4. When was the last time you've run: rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*; rpm
> > --rebuilddb
> 
> Never. But this was a fresh install last week.
> 
> Normally updates have been running on that machine in a pretty reasonable
> time while testing rawhide. But for some reason this one was taking a
> while.
> 
> The update on Friday was pretty large since all of the stuff that had
> been held for the beta was released. I wasn't watching real closely
> at the start, so maybe it had a slow startup as well, though once packages
> were being updated it wasn't too bad (several seconds per package typically).
> 
> The cpu usage at that time was almost zero. iotop wasn't installed so I
> didn't run that.
> 
> I keep an eye on things tomorrow when I apply the next set of updates.
> Is there anything particularly useful you want me to capture?

sure run yum like this:
yum -d 3 update
  - look for lines that match this 'time:'
  - memory use before you hit 'y' at the prompt
  - memory use after you hit 'y' at the prompt

thanks
-sv