Description of problem: The installer is painfully slow! Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: I used a DVD iso to upgrade FC5 test 2 on a dual p3 500 system and it took close to 6 hours! I just did an upgrade from RH 7.3 to RH 9 and it only took about 40 minutes --plus that was a much bigger jump! Steps to Reproduce: 1. Insert DVD reboot... 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: Additional info: I have trouble with this release all over... This is the first redhat/fedora release to support my 5 or 6 year old video card but it seems that now the distro is too "bleeding" to support my 6 year old PC!
Upgrades between (or from) test releases are not supported, if you want to test upgrades please test between a release and a test release - FC4 and FC5 test 3. Also you don't give any details on how long the test2 install took, how much memory you have, how many packages, etc. Comparing RH 7.3 to 9 is not really useful as we've completely reworked how package installation is done to use yum. Please confirm your test with more details on a supported upgrade path.
The system has 512 MB ram. 1168 packages were installed. A large portion of the time was switching between CD images on the DVD, like 20 - 30 minutes for each image and that was the same on fc5t2 install. I got tired waiting for test 2 to install and went to sleep so I don't know how long it ended up taking. This is the output of 'w' when the install finished; 17:48:24 up 5:50, 0 users, load average: 1.66, 2.33, 2.26 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
okay, it is around 6:30 pm pacific time, I will wipe the previous upgrade and install to a clean partition--if I had the time --which I don't! --I would install another release first. Anyway, I will try to keep track of the times involved, the package list and the system state.
Some improvements have been made in the speed of yum and rpm. However, keep in mind that we are very much at the mercy of the speed of rpm and the scriptlets that are run on each package upgrade. These scriptlets are where most of the speed problems are occurring, and there's not a lot we can do here.