[Aptitude-devel] apt vs. SSD computers

[Bob Proulx]

jidanni at jidanni.org wrote:
> And it seems to make things much better here on my SSD EEEPC 702.
> Bob, do CC me so I see this faster...

Okay.  I will be happy to CC you.  But please do not CC me.  I will
read the message from the mailing list.  Most importantly I am reading
the mailing lists as a best-effort case only.  I prefer to reserve
direct mailings for urgent communications.

Also the debian-mirrors isn't the place to debug this since it doesn't
have anything to do with mirroring.  But I will send one more reply to
tidy things up and then all other messages over to debian-user please.

> $ vmstat -n 2
> procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
>  r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
>  0  0      0 483308  25596 408892    0    0     0     0   46  125  0  1 99  0
>  1  0      0 478412  25596 408892    0    0     0     0  156  173 23  2 76  0
>  0  1      0 459580  25608 432576    0    0     0  1854  330  144 42 13  0 45
>  0  1      0 459340  25616 432576    0    0     0  2406  102  125  0  1  0 99
>  0  1      0 459216  25620 432576    0    0     0  2280  101  125  1  2  0 98
> ...

The si/so values all look okay.  So that refutes my hypothesis that
the machine was swapping.  And 1G of ram should be sufficient too.
But of course it all depends upon what else you have running at the
same time.

> OK, Bob, (sorry Otto) here's what happens when we hit Y to aptitude's
> 
> "No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed.
> 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
> Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]"
> 
> Which is the slowest thing I can recreate today.
> (It takes 28 seconds to do one big no-op.)

I find aptitude to be extremely slow on any machine.  Your 900MHz 1G
ram Asus EEE PC 702 is going to struggle with it.  I don't have
anything exactly the same but I do have an 866MHz Pentium 3 machine
with 256M ram here as the closest match and here are the timings from
it.  I ran each twice to show that the cache was warmed up for each.

  # time apt-get upgrade
  real    0m1.383s
  user    0m1.360s
  sys     0m0.020s

  # time apt-get upgrade
  real    0m1.389s
  user    0m1.344s
  sys     0m0.036s

  # time aptitude upgrade
  real    0m11.219s
  user    0m9.041s
  sys     0m0.720s

  # time aptitude upgrade
  real    0m12.026s
  user    0m9.053s
  sys     0m0.684s

Try apt-get instead of aptitude.  As you can see from this data it
will perform a lot better on your machine.

Bob