RPM/URPMI brings fast machine to its knees

[waferhead]

Just installed 2011 beta2 and brought it up to date, found everything I've tried so far, but it has a couple issues...

 

urpmi --auto-update brings this 3.6 GHz quad core machine with 4G RAM and 7200RPM drives to it's fracking knees.

 

I read some msg traffic from January about fsync on every file being the default and how that may/may not cause issues...

 

But this is insanely slow, running win7 on a 386-in-qemu slow....

the machine is basically thrashing the HD and is unusable if urpmi is running updates.

 

The machine flys running 2010-2.

It runs pretty darn good and looks great running cooker as long as I'm not doing anything with RPM.

(video slow--seems not to have working xv etc on the nvidia driver,(videos are slideshows) but I haven't investigated that.)

 

Is there a fix in the works for RPM?

Edited May 24, 2011 by waferhead

[ianw1974]

You're using a beta which is unstable and expected to have inherent problems.

 

Running Windows in qemu is generally bad in performance anyway, even more so if your machine is using a disk-based image file instead of using a partition. Disk-based image files will work better on a filesystem, such as xfs or jfs where large files perform better than say ext3 which performs like a dog with disk-based image files.

[waferhead]

The hideously slow disc performance due to RPM5 appears to be a known issue in cooker since January, the box is updated to current.

Installing using reiserfs or jfs for / and /usr SHOULD eliminate the issue, assuming that's still possible.

Haven't had time to verify as it took 2 days to install updates (with ~3mbps downloads speed) due to the issue.

 

The "Win7 on a 386-running-in-qemu" was a euphemism to describe the machines performance when urpmi is doing updates.

I generally don't run Windows at home, but Win7-RC ran great in Virtualbox on this machine.

 

Just putting it on the mandrivausers forums for general info to help others.

 

Thanks for the tip on avoiding running VM images off ext3/4, I use XFS on a raid0 for that, simply as my /video partition has room.

 

I've been running Linux since 1994, and have been running Mandriva ~exclusively since v7-v8.

This is not my first time at the rodeo.

[waferhead]

Currently reinstalling cooker from the Beta2 CD using jfs for / and /usr, running updates now, and the machine is mostly usable while running updates.

 

RPM5 still seems an order of magnitude slower than 2010.2, disc writes are no longer completely blocking, but it still stalls the GUI when doing many small writes, so the fsync issue is NOT just an issue for ext3/4.

 

It is still about 30X faster than when using the default ext4 /, the machine is at least usable when updates are running.