I've been running (testing's) dpkg on a low memory 486/33 a lot lately. Poor me. Anyway, it seems to take dpkg about 5 minutes to print *anything*, then in relatively short order, it reads the database, and is off to installing the package.
I straced it during the mysterious pause, and find it is reading what looks like the available file, one 16k block at a time, with each block taking almost 1 second to read on my 486. It's a 486, but it shouldn't be that slow. Is this a known performance problem, or should I look into it? -- see shy jo
