As a YUM developer it's hard not to notice the number of complaints/attacks on YUM about it being slow and/or using too much memory, the most common thing about almost all of these complaints though is how inaccurate they are. To be clear, YUM did used to take a lot more time than was required to do simple operations and there are very likely some more improvements that can be made for certain situations BUT yum is currently "not slow" at most normal operations for Fedora users and RHEL/CentOS users should be getting a much newer/faster variant than they currently have in the very near future.
( Read more...Collapse )As a final note I'd say that the biggest reason a lot of these recent complaints annoy me is not just that they are inaccurate but that they tend to grossly mislead the reader into thinking that "package management" is a solved problem and the biggest obstacle to solve is whether "install foo" takes 3 seconds or 6 seconds. In my opinion this could not be further from the truth, managing 2-6 machines is an ugly problem in all the current solutions and managing 100-10,000 is basically not done. Then there are things like the 10x10 problem, where we are only starting to see ideas like KOPERS which might help solve the problem (but will require changes in the way package management is assumed to work). And that's completely ignoring the problems that have had attempted solutions (that failed) multiple times, like "rollback" support.
May 21 2008, 15:37:40 UTC 5 years ago
Re: I love YUM but .....
Well I tried to make sure I mentioned it in the article, and I did link to the performance tests on different yum versions, but yes we know that older versions did cross the threshold from "fast enough" to "not fast enough" for various reasons. However current YUM code (I'm using 3.2.16 in Fedora 9) does "simple queries" in less than 2 seconds and "simple installs" in about 6 seconds (but note that you'll often need pacakges to be downloaded, and even if not RPM will need to install the packages -- which will add significantly to this) on the other end a full Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 update takes less than a minute within YUM (40ish seconds, IIRC).
I appreciate that CentOS 5 is still on 3.0.x, so anyone using that is going to have a radically different experience. However I assume the 3.2.8++ based version will be available "soon", given that it was released by Red Hat today. And I'd heard they'd been thinking of putting a 3.2.16 version into centosplus.
So my point was that, while those numbers could get smaller (and for all I know apt/zypper/etc. could be better in all cases) it is not the most beneficial goal to have the YUM part of install go from 6 seconds to 2 seconds.