On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 1:54 AM, Robin via arch-general < arch-general@archlinux.org> wrote:
Hi,
I was curious why does 'pacman -Q' operations took longer than 'apt' counterparts. Sounds interesting but I have a few question about how did you measure this and how big the difference is. (Shouldn't be that big). Would be great if you provide more information on the comparability of you systems and the tools you used for tracing. Maybe there are other reasons why it is slow on your installation ?
For long term pacman development road map, it would be better to use single sql based database for tracking locally installed packages instead of keeping directories of every installed packages. I am not sure if a sql based database would be a good solution if you where right. It adds much more complexity and also a dependencies on $SQL backend. For me as a semi-professional arch user this would be worse than a maybe "not that fast" package dB querying.
Regards, Robin
Sometimes I have a similar problem, too. When the system just boots up, or I just exploits my disk (for example building Firefox), pacman-related files are moved out of the disk cache, so it needs some time to read them all from the disk. Here's a simple performance test: $ sudo -v && time pacman -Q linux && sudo sync && sudo sync && echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && time pacman -Q linux [sudo] password for yen: linux 4.8.3-1 pacman --color=auto -Q linux 0.00s user 0.00s system 2% cpu 0.121 total 3 linux 4.8.3-1 pacman --color=auto -Q linux 0.00s user 0.01s system 0% cpu 1.229 total The difference is more than 10 times. I use a 5-year-old HDD. I guess on even older machines things are worse. Regards, Yen Chi Hsuan