[arch-general] pacman too slow on reboot

[Evangelos Foutras]

On 10/02/2010 04:49 μμ, Nilesh Govindarajan wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Recently I'm facing a funny problem. pacman (and even packer) is toooo
> slow to search -Ss (db+aur) or -Qs (db). I see a lot of HDD activity
> going on. But when I run pacman-optimize, it gets fixed.
>
> This happens at every boot. Any ideas ?

Pacman's package databases (located inside /var/lib/pacman) are composed 
of many small files. Going through all of those files requires lots of 
read operations from the disk, which as you've noticed take a 
non-trivial amount of time (maybe several seconds). These files are then 
cached in memory and subsequent pacman operations are very fast. When 
you perform a reboot, disk cache is cleared and the files need to be 
accessed from the disk again.

There has been discussion [1] about using a single tarball or an sqlite3 
database for storing the package databases (maybe except the local one 
which is generally not that big). However, I'm not aware of any 
definite, reliable solution that has been developed yet.

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[1] http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/8586