On Mon, May 29, 2006 at 12:00:32AM +1000, Tim Connors <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was heard to say: > I read that apt-get is to be deprecated in favour of aptitude, but > unfortunately, if that is to happen, aptitude *must* be made much more > memory lean. > > Debian is meant to be able to installed on a small machine with 32MB of > RAM, yet just performing an aptitude upgrade on a machine with 256MB > of ram was taking an inordinate amount of time just to read the > database. The reason being is that it wants to use: > 7800 root 18 0 184m 103m 97m D 3.3 41.3 0:26.73 aptitude > during in particular the "Building tag database" phase (although it > was hogging memory what I would call "excessively" before then too. > > That is seriously unusable. If I want to add a single package to the > system using aptitude, I can expect to wait half an hour for it to > install on a machine that is only a few years old -- 256MB is *not* a > small amount of RAM. > > Compare that to the same phase (asking me whether I want to continue) > in apt-get: > 9239 root 17 0 171m 17m 15m S 0.0 6.8 0:02.91 apt-get > > Same virtual ram, but it's not actually doing anything with what's > mapped, so it doesn't get read in. Much more acceptable, no? > > The number of packages I have installed (it is a desktop system) > appears to be 1580, and /var/lib/dpkg/info disk usage is 47MB (running > unstable). Anything else of relevance?
It might be useful to know what's in your sources.list. The startup time of aptitude is a known problem, but it probably won't get better until someone does some serious profiling to find out where the time is really going. Daniel
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