[Moving discussion about yum details to the correct list and setting reply-to, this is somewhat OT on freshrpms.net list] > > Yep, that's partially true. Unfortunately the current yum version > > doesn't support HTTP Keep-Alive so downloading individual headers for > > eg. the whole RH distro is dog slow (the author is aware of this and > > working on it when he finds time). FTP should work better. > To be clear - all the headers for rhl 7.3 takes about 20s to download on > my connections here w/o HTTP Keep-Alive. So "dog slow" might be a bit > strong. :) I'm sorry, it didn't come out exactly how I meant. I admit I was exaggerating, but there is a significant performance impact w/o keep-alive. Because pages under <http://www.dulug.duke.edu/yum/> and <https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/mailman/listinfo/yum> load very snappily here, I expected "yum update" to be a breeze also. I ran some tests right now, did a full "yum update" with only <http://mirror.dulug.duke.edu/pub/yum-repository/redhat/8.0/i386/> in my /etc/yum.conf and a clean /var/cache/yum. The result was that it took 29 minutes, 36 seconds. I watched the network activity during the update on GKrellM's net monitor, and a very inaccurate eye benchmark left me with a feeling that most of the time there was no traffic at all, just some bursts whenever a single .hdr was sucked. To compare, I grabbed <http://mirror.dulug.duke.edu/pub/yum-repository/redhat/8.0/i386/RedHat/RPMS/nautilus-2.0.6-6.i386.rpm> with wget (it's about the same size as all the .hdr files together from my previous test, 8.2M). It took 10 minutes, 14 seconds (~13 K/s) whereas the "yum update" throughput would be about 4.5 K/s. So, to be fair, maybe it's not "dog slow", but not having keep-alive seems to result in roughly about three-fold performance difference with my connection to mirror.dulug.duke.edu. It's likely that even with keep-alive, the *.hdr files download wouldn't be as fast as just downloading a single file of the same size, but it should be close. I also guess that when the connection to the server is better than in this test, the significance of keep-alive is neglible (20 sec sounds good enough to me :). Yes, this isn't a scientific method, but it should give you a picture what I meant, and it represents a real world scenario happening right here, right now. Oh. Just noticed that I get a ~12% packet loss to mirror.duke.dulug.edu with 245ms average reponse time, whereas for www.dulug.duke.edu it's 0% and 180ms. Hmm? > > rm -rf $REPODIR/headers > > yum-arch $REPODIR > > Shouldn't have to do the rm -rf - yum-arch does the header removal for > you. I can definitely add a option to quiet down yum-arch. I honestly > didn't anticipate people running it out of cron. Ah, good! Sorry again, I thought I asked about the quiet option in a previous post to yum-list, but memory didn't serve me well on this one. I'll try to behave :) Will also try without 'rm -rf'ing and let you know if it doesn't work it should. Cheers, -- \/ille Skyttä ville.skytta at iki.fi
