I notice pulp does a lot of work when syncing and publishing a yum repo even when there are no new packages in the source repo and the source yum metadata has not changed. I have a large yum repo that needs to be kept current on pulp so it is scheduled to sync and publish on a low interval, 5 minutes. The source repo is large, >7k packages, but pulp does a publish every time the schedule runs even though nothing has been added or removed from the repo.
Moved to https://pulp.plan.io/issues/281