On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Joey Hess wrote: > 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.
Also, on low-memory machines(<= 24m), dpkg goes into 'smallmem' mode, in an attempt to take less memory, and to locally memory access. However, in my testing, I found that largemem mode took the same footprint as smallmem(a patch to the largemem path a few years ago changed this), and that walking the internal smallmem structures can take a good amount of time on slow machines. In cvs, smallmem code has been removed.
