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