Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Now Know Why Portage Is So Slow

[Ryan Tandy <tarpman@gmail.com>]

Lord Sauron wrote:
> On 5/25/06, Thomas Kirchner <lists@halffull.org> wrote:
>> * On May 25 11:45, Lord Sauron (gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org) wrote:
>> > I've found (after much exploration) that there is a archive:
>> > /portage-20060123.tar.bz2
>>
Much exploration?  Forgive my amazement and please don't be *too* 
terribly offended by the rudeness of what I'm about to type, but...

you call `ls /` 'much exploration'??

> That's curious.  So I can delete this tarball then?
> 
Yes.  In fact, someone should tell the Installer people that it should 
clean up after itself.

>> > It takes about as long to start going as it does to open the archive
>> > /portage-20060123.tar.bz2 - conincidence?  I think not!
>>
>> I think so ;)
> 
> If it's not, then I really need to ask why on earth portage takes so
> long to just index and search packages that took apt-get much less
> time to work with.  I don't think it should be this slow.  I'm not
> even talking about compile-times - I know and expect those to be slow,
> but just raw package searching and stuff is not that fast.
> 

The time is how long it takes for python to 'import portage'. 
Unfortunately that's a limitation of the portage code - that even minor 
metadata searches and such can't take place without a full 'import 
portage'.  The import is a cached process, so the metadata only has to 
be loaded from disk once, and is quickly used from RAM each time thereafter.

If speed when searching packages is an issue, try app-portage/eix or 
http://gentoo-portage.com.
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list