Fedora 18 Beta to slip by two weeks, Beta release date is now Nov 27

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2012-11-09 at 07:32 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
> > Let's look at the practical examples. anaconda used to have its own
> > partition inspection code, its own loader stage, and its own network
> > management code and UI. Over the last few years, all of those have very
> > deliberately been killed and replaced with bits of the main distro. The
> > partition stuff was replaced by libparted; the loader was replaced by
> > dracut; and the network code was replaced by NetworkManager.
> 
> (Don't forget the depsolving, replaced by the yum API.)
> 
> As a result, Anaconda's memory usage has skyrocketed over the years. I 
> remember the days where Anaconda would happily install with 128 MiB RAM, and 
> where even that was already a lot compared to previous releases. Of course, 
> some of the increase is due to a larger work set (more packages to install), 
> but a lot of it is due to changes in Anaconda itself too.

It hasn't really 'skyrocketed'. We cited 512MB for several releases,
bumped it to 768MB for F15/F16 (IIRC), got it back down to 512MB for
F17, and it's back up to 768MB or 1GB for F18 atm because everyone has
more important stuff to do than optimize the RAM usage right now. But
it's not been rising crazily or anything. I think the last time someone
took a deep look at RAM use during install - during F17 cycle when we
got it back down to 512MB - it turned out a lot of the usage happened
during package install and wasn't really to do with anaconda at all.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
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