Package: apt Version: 0.6.46.4-0.1 Severity: wishlist Playing around with powertop, I noticed a huge amount of wake-ups while doing some massive apt-get install. Almost 1000 wake-ups reported by powertop.
These are due to usleep(1000) in apt-pkg/deb/dpkgpm.cc. The thing is that apt sets the pipe from dpkg as non-blocking, and doesn't wait on read()s, thus running into the loop and through the usleep(). This is useless and adds extra CPU wake-ups where there is no need for it. Simply commenting the fcntl(_dpkgin, F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK); line makes things cleaner, and it even seems that the install goes faster, and the number of i/o interrupts during install gets higher than when the pipe was non blocking, which would indicate a better throughput, too. While this comment is enough to keep the code working while improving things, the waitpid loop could obviously be improved a bit considering the fd is blocking. I can't seem to find a reason why the dpkg process would go zombie in such case, so I think this should be safe, but you can still prove me wrong. Cheers, Mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
