Bug 433619

Summary: yum has excessive memory consumption
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: James <james>
Component: yumAssignee: Seth Vidal <skvidal>
Status: CLOSED UPSTREAM QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: 8CC: ffesti, james.antill, katzj, pmatilai, tim.lauridsen
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2008-02-21 15:57:23 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description James 2008-02-20 12:13:12 UTC 
Description of problem:
yum (and its derivatives) consumes a lot of memory in operation, far more than
I'd expect given what it does. This causes an annoying flurry of swapping if
trying to do anything else on, say, a reasonable machine with 512 MiB RAM.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
yum-3.2.8-2.fc8

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install or update something with yum.
  
Actual results:
Shown are peak resident/virtual in MiB. livna (RPMFusion), fedora,
adobe-linux-i386 and updates repos activated.

Example 1: yum install hexedit, 132/190
Example 2: yum update (14 packages to update), 177/221

By comparison, this current Firefox session (4 tabs) is running 70/224, nautilus
23/159.

Memory usage seems to peak during the actual transaction stage.

Expected results:
A lot less memory allocated! Surely it can't be using all 130-odd MiB just to
install hexedit. yum update should be relatively unobtrusive. Other comparable
package trackers don't seem to have such hefty requirements, and are faster as
well; yum's desire for memory causes a lot of swapping that doesn't help this.
Comment 1 Seth Vidal 2008-02-21 15:57:23 UTC 
yum 3.2.10 and beyond have done a good bit to decrease yum's memory requirements.

Since there's nothing really here to 'fix' other than to make it better I'm
going to close this upstream.
Comment 2 James 2008-02-21 16:32:58 UTC 
OK, thanks for the info. I've grabbed yum-3.2.11-1.fc9 from development and I'll
see how that goes.