Created attachment 421472 [details] System Data on smolt, Xorg and dmesg Description of problem: 'sudo yum update' to update packages onto the USB-Flash Drive. Downloading speed of packages were normal. Update and install each package may take more than 90 seconds. Cleanup each package may take more than 30 seconds. A typical update of 50 packages may take more than one and a half hour. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Updating packages for Fedora 11, Fedora 12 and Fedora 13 of the installed USB-Flash Drive are all very slow. How reproducible: Everytime Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot up Fedora 13 installed on the USB-Flash Drive 2. sudo yum update 3. Actual results: The update progress indicator for each package appeared to the very slow and move very slowly. Expected results: As for updating packages installed on Hard Disk, the progress indicator was advancing much faster, even for a 80 MB package like the openoffice-core. Additional info:
My guess is that the USB flash disk just doesn't like fsync() calls or something. But maybe Panu will be able to give some more advise.
If you download a package you need to update and run: rpm -Uvh somepkg.rpm is it also slow?
Yeah, flash drives seem to hate fdatasync(). Adding "nofsync" option to rpm configuration should help somewhat, eg something like this: echo "%__dbi_other %{?__dbi_cdb} nofsync" > /etc/rpm/macros.dbi *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 529948 ***