Fixing yum performance

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 12 Jul 2012 11:21:42 +0200, Christopher Svanefalk wrote:

> A recurring problem I have had for several Fedora releases now is that Yum
> over time becomes slower and slower as more packages are installed. This is
> of course to be expected due to the DB growing, but in my case Yum has now
> become so slow that it is almost unusable. Normally, it takes 2-3 minutes
> just to install a single package. most of the time, this latency will take
> place between yum first being invoked, and the part where I am asked to
> accept that the packages are downloaded and installed. It thus seems to be
> a DB issue.
> 
> Is there any way to fix this??

You could find out the cause.  If it's reproducible/measurable for you,
explore the subdirectories in /var/lib/yum/ and clean up as much as you
like. Decide yourself which data you are not interested in. This stuff is
independent of the RPM DB, so you would only lose some details when running
"yum" queries, "yum history …", "yumdb …" e.g. the repo a package came from.

Especially in /var/lib/yum/yumdb/ lots of data pile up for installed
packages.

When have you last run "yum history new"? If would start a new history,
but old history files are kept in /var/lib/yum/history/ nevertheless here:

# du -hs /var/lib/yum/history
17M	/var/lib/yum/history
# yum history new
Loaded plugins: auto-update-debuginfo, langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
history new
# du -hs /var/lib/yum/history
17M	/var/lib/yum/history
# find /var/lib/yum/history | wc -l
1261

If that doesn't lead to anything:
Does it also affect ordinary Yum queries (yum list ..., yum info ...) as
well as "yum -C ..." operation (cache-only)? Or do you face issues with
network repository access?

-- 
Fedora release 17 (Beefy Miracle) - Linux 3.4.4-5.fc17.x86_64
loadavg: 0.58 0.67 0.50