After installing yum-priorities plugin yum takes forever to resolve dependencies. With the plugin disables `yum list updates' takes about 7 seconds on my Lenovo T60 with Centrino Duo & 2 gigs of RAM. With the plugin enabled resolving dependencies took almost 1 hour (!). top showed that yum eats the CPU all of the time. And that was only 51 packages to update.
I found the same problem (it exists also with yum-protectbase). I did some profiling and I found the problem is with yum itself. It is in the _getSacks function of __init__.py in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum This gets called for each package that needs to be erased and when there are a lot (like when using the dries repo at a lower priority than core/update which means more than a 1000 deletes) it is a large slowdown. The function checks for the existence of self._pkgSack but I guess the checks is done by calling the __len__ which extracts the list of packages. I fixed the problem by replacing if self._pkgSack and thisrepo is None: with if self._pkgSack != None and thisrepo is None: at the top of the _getSacks function. With this change, using yum-priorities with the dries repo is not slow anymore.
What ver of yum are you using right now?
I am using yum 3.2.2. rpm -q yum is yum-3.2.2-1.fc7
Please try out yum 3.2.4 from updates-testing - I think you'll find it's no longer slow.
Yes, that fixed it.
yum-3.2.4-2.fc7 has been pushed to the Fedora 7 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.