On Fri, 2006-10-27 at 11:13 -0700, John Reiser wrote:
It feels like there is a quadratic algorithm somewhere,
As usual, I ride the edge and am yum updating all my machines. First I tried my laptop which is a 700mhz PIII. I installed the new fedora-release package, did a "yum update glibc*" then "yum update yum * rpm*", so that its running the FC6 yum/rpm, before going for a full "yum update". It pegs the CPU for a long long time after "Reading repository metadata in from local files". Its not noticeably accessing the disk, or using a large amount of RAM. The system time is at 30%, yum takes the rest. The fan in my laptop is horribly worn out, something pegging the CPU for more than a minute or so causes it to overheat and turn off. I have been unable to complete a "yum update". I one sat and kept smacking the fan so it would keep spinning, yum went for a good 20 minutes before I got bored and distracted and let it overheat. (Sudden power failures during an RPM transaction is GREAT for your package database...) Updating a subset of packages at a time is much faster, "yum update xorg*", "yum update lib*", but it still takes 10sec-1min in the CPU crunching state depending on how many packages are involved.
I'm trying it right now on my Athlon 64 3000+ desktop. I installed the release file, did a "yum update glibc*", then went for a "yum update", so this time its with the FC5 yum. It didn't spend more than a few seconds after reading the metadata before it went to "Resolving Dependencies", spewing out lines of "Package xxxxxx set to be updated". (and eventually failing due to some weird dependency problem)
So now I just did a "yum update rpm* yum*", "yum clean all", then tried "yum update". Its doing the same thing, pegging the CPU, 20% system time, yum eating the rest. It took almost exactly 5 minutes to get from "Reading repository metadata in from local files" to "Resolving Dependencies".
I'd say yes, there's something going horribly wrong in the FC6 yum.