bootloader "very slow installation" --Fedora 19 Final Test Compose 2 (TC2)

[John Reiser]

Joerg Lechner wrote:
> ... on an old PC (524MB Ram, 1,6 GHz, board KVTA5, 2 disks: 20GB Fedora tests, 250GB Windows XP, PATA)
> ... The process installing the bootloader at the end of the installation process took about half an hour.

It is best to investigate using VT2.  Type <Ctrl><Alt><F2> (where <F2> is Function key F2)
to get a VGA text console.  Then use "ps -axl", 'top', 'strace -p', etc.
<Ctrl><Alt><F7> goes back to graphics.

The displayed message "Installing bootloader" is merely the most-recent message.
There is a following phase that displays no message but may take a long time.
This phase is the construction of the database for yum in /var/lib/yum/yumdb.
The database consists of a directory for each installed package, and each
directory contains 8 symlinks for the attributes of that package.
So if 1000 packages are installed then 9000 new files are created.
Because of journaling in the filesystem, that is at least 18000 seeks,
and they are likely to be longer seeks.  So instead of 100 seeks/second,
there may be only 40 to 50 seeks per second during this phase,
which implies around 6 to 8 minutes of seeking.  This phase is single-
threaded and each symlink is a commit, so there is little overlap
of CPU and seeking.  Add "ordinary I/O" (and/or paging) to access
the details for each package, etc.

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