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.
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.
OK, thanks for the info. I've grabbed yum-3.2.11-1.fc9 from development and I'll see how that goes.