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

[Panu Matilainen]

On 11/09/2012 08:08 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On 11/09/2012 09:57 AM, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>>
>> Except that rpm (and yum) use a lot LESS memory these days than they did
>> in the RHEL-5 era, which I think was used as a comparison here. That's
>> not where all the memory has gone, quite the contrary.
>
> While that may be true, the amount of ram (free -m) used during an
> install *triples* when we get to the desolve and package install phase.
>   In my most recent test the "used" number went from roughly 550m just
> before the packages step to 1645 during.

Hmm, not sure how meaningful the 'free' output is for memory use 
(process RSS is what I look at), but that is just way, way, way off. The 
depsolve + install stage obviously does need a very non-trivial amount 
of memory that anaconda wouldn't have required up to that point, but we 
should be talking about a *couple* of hundred megs at most for normal 
Fedora install/upgrade cases.

The one testcase I have at hand is a 3103 package install of F16 x86_64 
DVD contents into an empty chroot. That's roughly the double the size of 
an avegare/default installation, and the memory peak for that set when 
installing with rpm is circa 100M resident size (RSS). Yum does add a 
fair share of overhead but even if it doubled or tripled the memory use 
(its been a while since I last looked and dont remember offhand), its 
still nowhere near a gigabyte of additional memory.

Probably the biggest anaconda memory requirement jump I recall around 
Fedora 15 had to do with the overall layout changes (moving to one big 
initrd or something like that), not the actual anaconda process memory 
requirements. That's when I last looked at this and provided patches to 
save memory in the package installation area... but perhaps I should 
look at it again.

	- Panu -