[Aptitude-devel] Bug#697724: aptitude: selecting packages in the curses interface slow iff Acquire::GzipIndexes="true"

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo


Hi Axel,

2013-01-08 21:55 Axel Beckert:
>Package: aptitude
>Version: 0.6.8.2-1
>Severity: normal
>
>Hi,
>
>this may be the cause for the commenter's issues at
>http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=317841#10 but is likely
>not the cause for the issue of the original reporter of #317841 as there
>were no .gz in the file names he reported.
>
>If I set Acquire::GzipIndexes to "true" in apt.conf, remove all files
>from /var/lib/apt/lists/ and run "apt-get update" again, the downloaded
>files don't get uncompressed but stay in compressed form on disk.
>
>When I now start aptitude's TUI and move the selection up and down with
>the cursor keys (or click on a package with the mouse), it takes several
>hundred milliseconds until I see a reaction from aptitude if the
>selected line contains a package. It does not happen if I select a
>package group or if I don't use compressed package files. I suspect this
>is because aptitude needs to get the short description from the package
>list, because it's displayed in the status bar upon package selection.
>
>So it seems that aptitude uncompresses the package list which contains
>the selected package each time I select a package. An "strace -efile" on
>selecting the package initscripts with and without Acquire::GzipIndexes
>shows the following amounts of stat64() calls on the package lists:

Did you try this with apt-1.1 or 1.2?

Since you experience the original issue you are in a better position to
see if things improved since then.

Apart from other speed improvements, I think that the number of fields
cached are now more, and we made some changes in aptitude to use better
ways to access those.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>