On Sun, 2 May 2004 19:04:16 +0900
Jason Stubbs <jstubbs@gentoo.org> wrote:

> The performance issues are partially db-related, but the biggest
> "problem" is having to call bash. The current caching in portage is
> still stored in a file-based "database". The difference in access times
> of the portage database and the cache is that the cache files have a set
> format.

Most emerge commands, be it to sync the tree or perform a
package operation are very slow due to this bash handicap.  On one of the
faster sparc32 machines you can get, I'm seeing the following for a
pretend emerge of a package with few dependencies to calculate;

reliant root # time emerge -pv dnsmasq

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild   R   ] net-dns/dnsmasq-2.5   0 kB

Total size of downloads: 0 kB


real    0m23.827s
user    0m21.750s
sys     0m1.310s

A good portion of this time doesn't even show any output from emerge at
all.

Cheers,
-- 
Jason Wever
Gentoo/Sparc Team Co-Lead