Since I am doing a lot installs and upgrades I find the current standard package management tools to be very slow and I am looking for ways to speed up this process.
I have itemized parts of the process that seem slow to me as follows:
A. rpmdrake
1. Dialog: Please wait, finding available packages...
2. Status bar: Please wait, listing packages...
3. Getting files from xml meta-data
3. Getting changelog from xml meta-data
B. Urpmi
1. Preparing....
C. Mirrors
1. Downloading
A. rpmdrake
Rpmdrake seems to be slow in just getting the names of packages for the first part. It is probably spawning other processes.
Is there a way to speedup this part? Are there alternatives?
As for the second part I think this just how Perl + GUI works. It could be that Perl is slow with arrays and the GUI is slow with maintaining the tree of categories.
B. Urpmi
I also noticed there is parallel version of urpmi in the repository, urpmi-parallel-ka-run - Parallel extensions to urpmi using ka-run.
I have never used it. I would like to know if anyone had any experience with it. Ka-run seems to be part of machine clustering tools which I am not really in favor of right now.
On the other hand, Urpmi probably uses rpm which uses decompression tools for installation. I wonder if it uses the plain old single threaded gzip. Could we replace that with pigz?
C. Mirrors
To speed things in terms of downloading from around the world, I have created a local mirror inside my corporate environment. I will publish the steps here once I have time: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Finding_Mage ... te_network
originally posted as https://plus.google.com/+AgronSelimaj/posts/TRy3FSv4LdA