From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.75 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.6 sun4u) Description of problem: On a 32Mb machine up2date seems to slow down considerable when downloading packages once it has downloaded about 8Mb of a large package for the graphics version, and about 11Mb for the text version. It sounds as if the machine is swapping a lot beyond this point even when up2date is the only user level process. So far I haven't managed to update the XFree86 package (which is the biggest on my system), it looks like my first two attempts retrieved a truncated version, presumably due to the connection timing out somewhere along the line. (Note it looks like it still tries to install the package, even though it knows it has a truncated version). Incidentally, I personally don't need a fix to this problem, I expect this machine to be replaced very soon, but I thought I would report it in case it is likely to affect other users. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Attempt to up2date a big package on a 32Mb system. Additional info:
low memory situations are a bit hard to handle. For speed reasons, up2date keeps a in memory cache of some headers. By default, this in memory cache is limited to 40 headers, which depending on the headers can be 10 or 20 megs worth. The current limit is really designed to put a cap on the "huge upgrade" situration where memory caching all the headers isnt pratical. You might want to try changing the value of "headerCacheSize" in the /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date config file to something less than 40. This will of course increase disk reads/writes, but should take less memeory. The actual install of the packages is more difficult to control though, as thats a rpm issue, and on big package sets can often be pretty large.
I set the header cache to 5, but it didn't seem to make much difference, nor did upgrading the kernel.
Current versions of the client are much better about memory useage. Anything 2.7.11 or higher should handle this much better. There were a couple of places where I was copying buffers around where I really didnt need to and eating way too memory.