post install very slooow

[Seth Vidal]

On Sun, 11 Nov 2012, drago01 wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 4:42 PM, John Reiser <jreiser at bitwagon.com> wrote:
>>>> I noticed the post install processing in f16 lasted only
>>>> a few seconds, not the seemingly interminable wait
>>>> a Fedora 18 install takes.
>>
>> If you have many partitions, then the grub2 operating system prober
>> takes a while to construct grub.cfg: more than half a minute for my
>> three dozen partitions.  This is new with grub2 instead of grub.
>>
>> Most of the rest is yum, in two parts.  The first is verifying
>> that all the files named in all the packages actually did get installed.
>> The second is constructing the yum database, which uses symbolic links
>> in the filesystem.  Look in /var/lib/yum/yumdb to see this monster.
>> You'll notice that the harddrive LED stays on the whole time!
>> Journalling all that is _expensive_.
>
> <rant>
> The yum "database" isn't really a database ... this kind of database
> design costs you that. There are lots of databases available no idea
> why yum had to invent its own non database and use it as a database.
> </rant>


remember - yum has to work at install - so our options were bdb or sqlite.

the filesystem made sense b/c anything else incurred a greater cost of 
having to setup and maintain a schema, forever and hope to be able to update it.

The symlinks are actually hardlinks and that was to make it faster to 
traverse and setup.

I understand you just wanted to rant, but I figured you should know that 
the costs of maintaining them in sqlite was significant, in bdb was 
mystical and in anything else was simply a dependency nightmare.


-sv