yum, can it be faster?
April 16th, 2008 mysurface Posted in Admin, yum | Hits: 33017 | 11 Comments »
Recently I install fedora to my laptop instead of ubuntu or any debian based distro, the application that I concern the most is yum. I have bad experience on yum previous during fedora core 5, which I find it extremely slow. Therefore I search for some guidelines from my friend Kagesenshi who are extremely active in Malaysia Fedora Community.
First question I throw to him is, Can yum be faster? He throws me back lots of tips over the IRC. Yeah! there are many tips indeed to make yum run faster, he wrote a post reviews all his kungfu on yum, don’t miss out his post, click here. Yum support plugins, one of them is Fastest Mirror, what this plugin does is it scan for the nearest mirror and pick the fastest one for you.
One of the yum’s shortcomings that bothers me so much is the latency of package searching, to search for available package, let say kmess, I do this:
yum search kmessTo do the same thing under apt, I do this
apt-cache search kmessSeriously, apt-cache really out performs yum. One of the ‘feature’ that yum provides me is ‘intelligently’ do cache update when I ask for package searching. I really don’t understand the reason of such design. Why would it want to do the cache update when I just instruct it to do the package searching?
Well, I need to specified -C to force yum to do the package searching through the current available cache like this:
yum -C search kmessIt doesn’t really improve the speed of searching, but at least it do away the unexpected auto cache update.
I figure out a way which will makes my search faster, but for that I need to do some manual work before searching. One of the option yum support is to list all the packages which is either available or installed, well I can extract them into a file like this.
yum list all > yum-cache.txt The result will look like this:
...
ConsoleKit-x11.i386 0.2.3-3.fc8.1 installed
GConf2.i386 2.20.1-1.fc8 installed
GConf2-devel.i386 2.20.1-1.fc8 installed
ImageMagick.i386 6.3.5.9-1.fc8 installed
MAKEDEV.i386 3.23-1.2 installed
MySQL-python.i386 1.2.2-4.fc8 installed
...
SILLY-devel.i386 0.1.0-4.fc8 updates
SIMVoleon.i386 2.0.1-7.fc8 fedora
SIMVoleon-devel.i386 2.0.1-7.fc8 fedora
SOAPpy.noarch 0.11.6-6.fc7 fedora
ScientificPython.i386 2.6-10.fc8 fedora
ScientificPython-devel.i386 2.6-10.fc8 fedora
...
Yeah, with that list now, I can search my package using grep
grep kmess yum-cache.txtOr simply open it with less for consequent search
less yum-cache.txtYum list doesn’t extract the details package’s description, in case you need to search through the detail info, you can extract the detail info like this:
yum info all > yum-info.txtFedora 9 is on its way to us, lets see whether can yum be faster this time.
Some may suggest to use apt-rpm, but will apt-rpm as fast as apt-deb?
April 16th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
You can cache the yum meta data – that will make things much faster. Edit the /etc/yum.conf and set the ‘metadata_expire’ as ’2592000′ or so. See the manual for details.
April 16th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Binny: Yeah, I do that also, it increase expiration to almost infinity, so it will do away the unexpected auto cache update, It does become faster, but still cannot compete with the speed of apt-cache.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
[...] yum, can it be faster? [...]
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:43 am
Oh – OK. Sorry – I misunderstood your question. I too hope yum will get faster.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Binny: may be I should consider apt-rpm :p
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May 19th, 2011 at 4:22 am
tnx admin
June 1st, 2011 at 10:45 am
One of the yum
November 2nd, 2011 at 6:43 am
tnx admin…great halpeful