On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 7:33 PM, Philipp <hollunder@lavabit.com> wrote:
Hi there, pacman works very well for me, with one exception: searching for installed packages. For me a -Ss takes about 5 seconds, a -Qs 25 seconds. I also noticed that this seems to be true for the first search run only, the following ones are less than a second, no matter whether it's a repo or local search. But if you want to just quickly find out a thing, 25 seconds or so is a long time.
Anyway, I had a very brief look at the code and am far from understanding it, but I think libalpm/db.c handles the search, the package names, descriptions, etc. are stored in a linked list of structs, the whole thing is cached in memory only and regex wizardry is used for the search. If that's true, the bottleneck I experience is the caching.
5 seconds for -Ss is acceptable for me, but I wonder whether there's a reasonably easy way to improve the 25 seconds of -Qs.
My knowledge of pacman internals is non-existant and my C skills are minimal, so I don't think I can be a lot of help with this one, but maybe there's something else I can be of help with instead.
Best regards, Philipp
I'm getting 10s -Qs first-time searches, what harddrive are you using??