Just did an upgrade and it took 12 hours??

[Michael D. Setzer II]

Have a notebook that I had installed Fedora on some time ago.
Have upgraded it via DNF a few times, but this time I actually was watching it 
versus just coming back later to find it done.
The clean installation only took about 20 minutes originally, but I've added a 
lot of things to it. Showed about 5000 packages.
Download was fine with about 5.3G, and then the upgrade reboot.
It showed 9999 items, with the installation of the new packages, and the 
cleanup of the  old, and finally the verify complete.
Ended up taking just over 12 hours?
Just wondering why the process took so long.
Is that normal??
+------------------------------------------------------------+
 Michael D. Setzer II - Computer Science Instructor (Retired)     
 mailto:[e-mail]                            
 mailto:[e-mail]
 Guam - Where America's Day Begins                        
 G4L Disk Imaging Project maintainer 
 http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/
+------------------------------------------------------------+

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu (Original)
Number of Seti Units Returned:  19,471
Processing time:  32 years, 290 days, 12 hours, 58 minutes
(Total Hours: 287,489)

BOINC@HOME CREDITS

ROSETTA      66311323.990119 | ABC          16613838.513356
SETI        109804121.703177 | EINSTEIN    141859222.999240

[Sam Varshavchik]

Michael D. Setzer II writes:
> Have a notebook that I had installed Fedora on some time ago.
> Have upgraded it via DNF a few times, but this time I actually was watching  
> it
> versus just coming back later to find it done.
> The clean installation only took about 20 minutes originally, but I've added  
> a
> lot of things to it. Showed about 5000 packages.
> Download was fine with about 5.3G, and then the upgrade reboot.
> It showed 9999 items, with the installation of the new packages, and the
> cleanup of the  old, and finally the verify complete.
> Ended up taking just over 12 hours?
> Just wondering why the process took so long.
> Is that normal??

That sounds a little bit high, but not too high. One of my, very fat  
servers, has about five thousand packages, and I reckon a typical download  
takes about 3.5-4gigs, and an upgrade to a new fedora release takes about  
four hours to get through.

This server doesn't use plymouth, so the upgrade runs in text mode, and I  
get to keep an eye on the console screen. It takes about two seconds to  
update each package. Plus uninstalling the old package, in the uninstall  
package, takes about a second. So when you run the math, it adds up to about  
four hours.

It's not the actual file installation that's a burner, but most packages  
install or uninstall shared libraries, and thus need to run ldconfig, which  
scans the entire /lib64 directory. Actually not one /lib64, but there are a  
couple of them, here and there. With every package install/uninstall.

There are no simple solutions here. It is what it is.

[stan]

On Fri, 21 Jun 2019 08:44:16 +1000
"Michael D. Setzer II"  wrote:
> Ended up taking just over 12 hours?
> Just wondering why the process took so long.
> Is that normal??

The speed of the hard drive is a big factor.  The next update you do,
open iotop in a terminal and see what kind of IO speeds you get for
your disk.

[ToddAndMargo]

On 6/20/19 3:44 PM, Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
> Have a notebook that I had installed Fedora on some time ago.
> Have upgraded it via DNF a few times, but this time I actually was watching it
> versus just coming back later to find it done.
> The clean installation only took about 20 minutes originally, but I've added a
> lot of things to it. Showed about 5000 packages.
> Download was fine with about 5.3G, and then the upgrade reboot.
> It showed 9999 items, with the installation of the new packages, and the
> cleanup of the  old, and finally the verify complete.
> Ended up taking just over 12 hours?
> Just wondering why the process took so long.
> Is that normal??

Something is not right.

Do you have really, really slow hardware?

Did you have any USB drive plugged in?  Something
goes wrong there and you will slow down to a crawl.
This nails my dump backups every so often.

I just upgrade two nearly identical Fedora 28
servers to Fedora 30.  The one with the mechanical
drives (RSTe Raid 1) took 2 hours and 38 minutes.
The second one with SSD drives (also RSTe RAID 1)
took 36 minutes.

[Samuel Sieb]

On 6/20/19 3:44 PM, Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
> Have a notebook that I had installed Fedora on some time ago.
> Have upgraded it via DNF a few times, but this time I actually was watching it
> versus just coming back later to find it done.
> The clean installation only took about 20 minutes originally, but I've added a
> lot of things to it. Showed about 5000 packages.
> Download was fine with about 5.3G, and then the upgrade reboot.
> It showed 9999 items, with the installation of the new packages, and the
> cleanup of the  old, and finally the verify complete.
> Ended up taking just over 12 hours?
> Just wondering why the process took so long.
> Is that normal??

Laptops are slow unless you have an SSD.  However, that is definitely 
excessive.  I have upgraded many laptops and generally it takes 3-4 
hours.  You do have about 50% more packages than I usually have 
installed.  The funny thing is that with the laptops I worked with, the 
oldest laptop was much faster than all the new ones.

[ToddAndMargo]

On 6/20/19 9:01 PM, Samuel Sieb wrote:
> Laptops are slow unless you have an SSD

I work on a lot of laptops with mechanical drives.  They
drive me I-N-S-A-N-E.  I can feel my beard growing.

I love it when they start having problems with
their drive and the customer lets me clone them over
a Samsung SSD drive. I love Clonezille for such.
Clonezilla has a fix bad sectors option in advanced.

And the users are ticked.  It is like the got a super fast
brand new laptop with all their stuff already set up on it!

[Michael D. Setzer II]

It's an Acer Aspire E1-731-4699 Intel Pentium 2020M Processor 2.4Ghz dual 
core. Seemed to be doing just one package at a time.
Was a computer science instructor for 36+ years, so had lots of extra stuff 
loading on machines to show students in various classes. Generally taught 7 
different courses each semester. Retired summer of 2017. 
Did the upgrade from 28 to 29, since once had a problem doing a 2 version 
upgrade. Except for the time, everything went ok.

When still teaching I would do an upgrade on one desktop using dnf, and do 
a clean install on another. Then would compare the rpm -qa lists to see what 
new things came in the clean install, and would generally add the to the 
upgrade list. Would the use the udpcast of my G4L to image to the other 19 
machines in my lab.

On 20 Jun 2019 at 18:35, ToddAndMargo via users wrote:

Subject:        	Re: Just did an upgrade and it took 12 hours??
To:             	[e-mail]
Date sent:      	Thu, 20 Jun 2019 18:35:58 -0700
Send reply to:  	Community support for Fedora users 

From:           	ToddAndMargo via users 

Copies to:      	ToddAndMargo
> On 6/20/19 3:44 PM, Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
> > Have a notebook that I had installed Fedora on some time ago.
> > Have upgraded it via DNF a few times, but this time I actually was watching it
> > versus just coming back later to find it done.
> > The clean installation only took about 20 minutes originally, but I've added a
> > lot of things to it. Showed about 5000 packages.
> > Download was fine with about 5.3G, and then the upgrade reboot.
> > It showed 9999 items, with the installation of the new packages, and the
> > cleanup of the  old, and finally the verify complete.
> > Ended up taking just over 12 hours?
> > Just wondering why the process took so long.
> > Is that normal??
>
> Something is not right.
>
> Do you have really, really slow hardware?
>
> Did you have any USB drive plugged in?  Something
> goes wrong there and you will slow down to a crawl.
> This nails my dump backups every so often.
>
> I just upgrade two nearly identical Fedora 28
> servers to Fedora 30.  The one with the mechanical
> drives (RSTe Raid 1) took 2 hours and 38 minutes.
> The second one with SSD drives (also RSTe RAID 1)
> took 36 minutes.
> _______________________________________________
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+------------------------------------------------------------+
 Michael D. Setzer II - Computer Science Instructor (Retired)     
 mailto:[e-mail]                            
 mailto:[e-mail]
 Guam - Where America's Day Begins                        
 G4L Disk Imaging Project maintainer 
 http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/
+------------------------------------------------------------+

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu (Original)
Number of Seti Units Returned:  19,471
Processing time:  32 years, 290 days, 12 hours, 58 minutes
(Total Hours: 287,489)

BOINC@HOME CREDITS

ROSETTA      66311323.990119 | ABC          16613838.513356
SETI        109804121.703177 | EINSTEIN    141859222.999240

[Michael D. Setzer II]

Thanks for the info.
I'm the maintainer of G4L since 2004, which is a diskimaging program.
It is free, and defaults to a bit level copy. It does include ddrescue that 
handles disks with bad sectors to a degree. Actually, can add it as a boot 
option on the grub menu with the kernal file and ramdisk.lzma.

Should probable look at an SDD disk, but not sure if the disk is the problem 
or just the dnf upgrade process.
Disk doesn't seem to be slow, but don't know what results an SDD wourld 
have.
hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   6180 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3095.49 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 406 MB in  3.01 seconds = 134.89 MB/sec

On 20 Jun 2019 at 21:27, ToddAndMargo via users wrote:

Subject:        	Re: Just did an upgrade and it took 12 hours??
To:             	[e-mail]
Date sent:      	Thu, 20 Jun 2019 21:27:51 -0700
Send reply to:  	Community support for Fedora users 

From:           	ToddAndMargo via users 

Copies to:      	ToddAndMargo
> On 6/20/19 9:01 PM, Samuel Sieb wrote:
> > Laptops are slow unless you have an SSD
>
> I work on a lot of laptops with mechanical drives.  They
> drive me I-N-S-A-N-E.  I can feel my beard growing.
>
> I love it when they start having problems with
> their drive and the customer lets me clone them over
> a Samsung SSD drive. I love Clonezille for such.
> Clonezilla has a fix bad sectors option in advanced.
>
> And the users are ticked.  It is like the got a super fast
> brand new laptop with all their stuff already set up on it!
> _______________________________________________
> users mailing list -- [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe send an email to [e-mail]
> Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
> List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
> List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]

+------------------------------------------------------------+
 Michael D. Setzer II - Computer Science Instructor (Retired)     
 mailto:[e-mail]                            
 mailto:[e-mail]
 Guam - Where America's Day Begins                        
 G4L Disk Imaging Project maintainer 
 http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/
+------------------------------------------------------------+

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu (Original)
Number of Seti Units Returned:  19,471
Processing time:  32 years, 290 days, 12 hours, 58 minutes
(Total Hours: 287,489)

BOINC@HOME CREDITS

ROSETTA      66311323.990119 | ABC          16613838.513356
SETI        109804121.703177 | EINSTEIN    141859222.999240

[Samuel Sieb]

On 6/20/19 10:59 PM, Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
> Disk doesn't seem to be slow, but don't know what results an SDD wourld
> have.
> hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
>
> /dev/sda:
>   Timing cached reads:   6180 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3095.49 MB/sec
>   Timing buffered disk reads: 406 MB in  3.01 seconds = 134.89 MB/sec

Those numbers are not useful.  Pretty much just testing how fast your 
RAM is.  You need uncached reads and writes to test the actual disk speed.

[ToddAndMargo]

On 6/20/19 10:59 PM, Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
> Except for the time, everything went ok.

Install gsmartcontrol and test your hard drive

$ dnf whatprovides gsmartcontrol
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:10 ago on Fri 21 Jun 2019 12:08:04 
AM PDT.
gsmartcontrol-1.1.3-4.fc30.x86_64 : Graphical user interface for smartctl
Repo        : @System
Matched from:
Provide    : gsmartcontrol = 1.1.3-4.fc30

gsmartcontrol-1.1.3-4.fc30.x86_64 : Graphical user interface for smartctl
Repo        : fedora
Matched from:
Provide    : gsmartcontrol = 1.1.3-4.fc30

If your hard drive is going bad, Fedora will (usually)
correct for it, but you will crawl.

Also, you never answered my question about there being any
USB devices installed at the time.

If no USB problems and no hard drive problems, then
I would say you just had a ton of stuff installed
as you suspected.  Then again with your experience
in computers, you did have a gut feeling that something
was wrong.

Still it seems like an awfully long time.

Have you though of upgrade to a Samsung SSD drive?
(I would not touch the other brands.)

-T

[Ed Greshko]

On 6/21/19 3:00 PM, Samuel Sieb wrote:
> On 6/20/19 10:59 PM, Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
> > Disk doesn't seem to be slow, but don't know what results an SDD wourld
> > have.
> > hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
> >
> > /dev/sda:
> >   Timing cached reads:   6180 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3095.49 MB/sec
> >   Timing buffered disk reads: 406 MB in  3.01 seconds = 134.89 MB/sec
>
> Those numbers are not useful.  Pretty much just testing how fast your RAM is.  You need
> uncached reads and writes to test the actual disk speed.

I suppose the question I would ask is:

Other than the upgrade taking 12 hours have you noticed any other issue?

[George N. White III]

On Thu, 20 Jun 2019 at 20:37, Michael D. Setzer II  wrote:
> Have a notebook that I had installed Fedora on some time ago.
> Have upgraded it via DNF a few times, but this time I actually was
> watching it
> versus just coming back later to find it done.
> The clean installation only took about 20 minutes originally, but I've
> added a
> lot of things to it. Showed about 5000 packages.
> Download was fine with about 5.3G, and then the upgrade reboot.
> It showed 9999 items, with the installation of the new packages, and the
> cleanup of the  old, and finally the verify complete.
> Ended up taking just over 12 hours?
> Just wondering why the process took so long.
> Is that normal??

No.  You should consider a failing disk and/or CPU throttling
due to cooling problems.

At my former work (now retired) we went through a period
where laptop drives got very slow and eventually failed.  Our
workloads were disk intensive, so disks often failed within the
warranty period (and getting a warranty replacement from some
big-name vendors could be a Monty Python dead disk sketch).

There were various tools to monitor S.M.A.R.T status, these
usually gave some indication that a drive was going downhill.
IT just bought boxes of new drives and replaced them when users
complained about slow systems (a new drive cost less than
the man-hours needed to file a warranty replacement claims, not
to mention lost time for user waiting on the replacement).

We also had a batch of thinkpads that collected dust in the CPU
heatsink and would slow down when they got hot.  It was not hard
to open them up and clean out the dust with canned air.  There
may be tools to display some info about temps or CPU speeds,
but users knew when the laptops felt "feverish".

[Gordon Messmer]

On 6/20/19 3:44 PM, Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
> Ended up taking just over 12 hours?
> Just wondering why the process took so long.

IIRC, there will be dnf logs of the process.  I would take a look at 
those to see if the rate was steady for the entire period, or if there 
was a period of time where less was happening.  It could be that one or 
a few packages had complex scripts to run, or did something that 
attempted to use an unavailable network and had to time out.

Otherwise, the messages log file would probably include IO errors if 
there is something wrong with the disks.

[George N. White III]

On Fri, 21 Jun 2019 at 15:10, Gordon Messmer 
wrote:
> On 6/20/19 3:44 PM, Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
> > Ended up taking just over 12 hours?
> > Just wondering why the process took so long.
>
> IIRC, there will be dnf logs of the process.  I would take a look at
> those to see if the rate was steady for the entire period, or if there
> was a period of time where less was happening.  It could be that one or
> a few packages had complex scripts to run, or did something that
> attempted to use an unavailable network and had to time out.
>
> Otherwise, the messages log file would probably include IO errors if
> there is something wrong with the disks.

My experience has been that disks can become very slow without
generating IO errors.  Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_failuresays: "Gradual
hard-drive failure can
be harder to diagnose, because its symptoms, such as corrupted data
and slowing down of the PC (caused by gradually failing areas of the hard
drive requiring repeated read attempts before successful access), can be
caused by many other computer issues, such as malware
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware."
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