On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 12:01:09PM -0400, Paul Pianta wrote: > I ran a 'tail -f /var/log/messages' on the server while running a yum > update on one of the clients. Everything goes well but rather slowly. > The tail shows me that the ftp client is logging in - downloading > something (ie. header or package) then logging out, then it does this > all again for the next header/package. All of this logging in and out > obviously slows down the whole business. > > I am wondering if this is a natural yum behaviour or it is due to my ftp > client and authentication stuff. Here's the deal. Yum uses urlgrabber, a python module for handling urls (duh), which in turn uses urllib2, a built-in python url-handling module, which in turn uses things like ftplib and httplib. Now, what you're describing is the way ftplib handles things. It's not really optimized for multiple downloads. There is such a thing as a caching ftp opener (which supposedly reuses connections), but we haven't explored it very much. Most people tend to use http and it's a bit easier for us to work with, so that gets most of our attention. My point is: this isn't exactly a bug. It's known current behavior. It's not really desired, but we haven't done a lot to address it. If anybody out there does try to pursue this, they should chat with us (me and Ryan) on the yum-devel list because there are some fairly subtle interaction issues that need to be considered. Note: this problem doesn't exist with an http server that supports keepalive; those connections are reused. -Michael -- Michael D. Stenner mstenner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ECE Department, the University of Arizona 520-626-1619 1230 E. Speedway Blvd., Tucson, AZ 85721-0104 ECE 524G
