[pacman-dev] Unnecessary syscalls

[Tim Nieradzik]

Hello,

it's  my  first  message  on  this   list.   I'd  like  to  make  a  few
contributions  to  improve  Pacman's  performance.  Pacman  is  a  great
package  manager  which  I'm now  using  for  a  few  years  without any
problems.  It also  has a  very clear and  well-structured code  but its
disk stress concerns me a bit.

Looking at  strace,  a few syscalls appear  superfluous to me.  Deleting
them made pacman  -Syu (right after a disk flush)  about 10s faster (70%
less syscalls). Here's the patch:

http://pastebin.archlinux.fr/406557

I've already talked about it on the forum but they advised me to discuss
it  here   instead.   There  are  also  some   suggestions  for  further
optimizations:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=101702

What do you think?

--Tim