[Debian-uk] Request for help speeding up dpkg

[Dan Hatton]

On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Mark Brown wrote:

> > My machine has 64MB of RAM and a 1GB swap partition.

> How much free memory do you have when things start to slow down?  That's
> not all that much RAM and if something's decided that it wants to use a
> good chunk of it actively while dpkg is running that would cause the
> system to hit swap heavily which would explain the behaviour you see.
> Try running top on another VT and seeing if there's anything else active
> while dpkg is grinding away.

That was instructive.  Swap is indeed being hit heavily (up to 140MB
during the `Reading database' phase, dropping to ~120MB during the
`really unpacking' phase.)  However, it doesn't seem that anything
other than dpkg is doing the hitting: dpkg's declared memory usage is
up to 78%, nothing else goes above 1%, and the sum of all individual
processes' declared memory usage goes up to a maximum of 92%.  The
total memory usage given at the top of the screen is about 98%.

Can I make dpkg use less memory, or am I going to have to go out and
buy some RAM?

Thanks very much

Dan