[WBEL-users] Switch over to APT

[Kirby C. Bohling]

On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 09:27:43PM -0500, Edward Rudd wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-12-27 at 20:52, Kirby C. Bohling wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 08:28:04PM -0500, Edward Rudd wrote:
> 
> > Can you qualify "SOOO long" into a literal time (30 seconds, 10
> > minutes, an hour, several days?)  I'm known people who depending on
> > the operation, "SOOO long" could have meant any of those.  It's hard
> > to tell if you are having real problems, or if you have unrealistic
> > expectations.
> 
> approximately 10-20 minutes per yum operation. even tried to get it to
> STOP updatting from the network (yum -C) as it seemed to update more
> stuff every time it bounced on a different mirror. Now this was on a
> P166 w/ 80MB of ram. the first major "yum update" took nearly an hour.
> 
> Apt, however run quite fast on this box with <1minute update and startup
> times < 30 seconds. 

Hmmm, I'm not sure what to say.  I can understand the problem now.
If you have the time and energy, I'd try making a local repository
(if only a very small one, and very briefly) and see if the problem
continues to take excessive amounts of time.  If only just download
a handful of packages you need to update, run yum-arch on them.
Setup a quickie Apache config making all of that available.  Run it,
see how long it takes.  If it takes over 60 seconds, my guess is
that your machine is just too underpowered to run yum.  If it takes
less time then 15 seconds, you probably need to find a reliable,
fast, close mirror (I solved this by getting on my LAN).  If it's in
between, I'd have to keep testing (try a larger local mirror).

I'm not digging up a machine that old and slow to see if I can
duplicate your problem *grin*.

I'm fairly sure apt is a real honest to goodness C program, where as
yum is an interpreted python script.  Python at times (anaconda
comes to mind), isn't light on CPU or memory consumption.  The
machine is old enough that I have no experience on that class of
machine with WBEL.  However, I do understand the 10-20 minute
frustration, that is unacceptable.

	Sorry I can't be more certain about a fix,
		Kirby