From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686) Gecko/20030530 Galeon/1.3.5 Description of problem: As mentioned in the rpm-list list, I cannot create indexes for rpm. I've changed LANG=en_US and also tried with LANG=C (and unset LANG), with no effect. I cannot figure out how to pipe the results to a file for attachment: rpm --rebuilddb -vv > hideously_slow.asc still spews to the console. Can you remind me how this is supposed to be done? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 4.1.1-1.8x How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Get a ThinkPad T30, install RH8, and up2date and ximian evolution updates. 2. rpm (anything, rebuild, install, upgrade etc.) 3. practice singing "Anticipation..." Actual Results: rpm --rebuilddb takes 8 minutes on a freshly-installed 1.2GHz laptop, but takes half that time on my ancient dual-PIII 450. ? And when I am done, there are no __db* files in /var/lib/rpm... Expected Results: 'rpm -qa' or 'rpm --rebuilddb' do not provide the __db* files either. Additional info: As soon as someone can remind me how to pipe the results to a file, I'll attach to this bugreport.
Created attachment 93301 [details] results of rpm --rebuilddb -vv
Sanity checks: 1) I have ~1000 pkgs, /usr/bin/time rpm --rebuilddb -vv took 1:45.31 minutes on 600 MHz dual i686, SCSI. 2) --rebuilddb does not recreate __db* files, any other command run as root should create, but existence of __db* files is not really a problem. 3) what version of rpm are you using? Hmmm, so --rebuilddb on laptop is slow. Can you provide "cat /proc/cpuinfo" from laptop? Can you also check /usr/bin/time rpm -qa on your two machines?
I did the sanity checks, and here's what I get: 1) I have 761 packages, and I get the following: 28.90user 4.08system 2:51.33elapsed 19%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k 0inputs+0outputs (500major+13298minor)pagefaults 0swaps The most annoying part about this is that while it is running, all other applications (evolution, terminals, konqueror, etc.) grind to a halt (almost making me think the machine is hung or out of disk). But you can see that there's plenty of cpu to go around (Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 - M CPU 1.80GHz). 2) There are no __db* files, even after root doing 'rpm -qa', 'rpm --rebuilddb', 'rpmbuild --rebuild (SRPM)', etc. 3) rpm-4.1.1-1.8x Results of 'rpm -qa' timing test: laptop was faster than old machine, but -qa is not what is taking so long. It is -Uvh, --rebuilddb, -e and -i that are taking so long.
OK, then you're probably slow (but not exceptionally so) because of disk writes, that's what differentiates -U/-e/-i/--rebuilddb from -qa. The other processes stopping is (my guess) probably the same cause, there's nothing magic that rpm is doing, I suspect that any output intensive program would have similar effect on other processes, possibly because of swapping. Try running vmstat 1 in a window to eyeball your disk I/O. Running top might give you a handle on swapped too. SO what happens if you do, say, tar czvf /tmp/xxx.tar.gz /usr while monitoring. Do disk writes cause slow response?
Hmm, this machine is swapping like mad. Could it be the new-and-improved kernel (2.4.20)? I'm gonna try booting into the old kernel and see... Regardless, looks like you're of the hook regarding RPM ;^) Thanks for the help.