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Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 14:13:30 +0000
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From: Richard Kettlewell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Subject: feature request: gzip /var/lib/apt/lists/*
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Package: apt
Version: 0.5.4
This directory takes up a lot of space, but the packages files it
contains are highly compressible (about 75% can be saved on one of my
systems). This may not be much of an issue on large modern machines
but I still have one system which is short of disk space.
Space may not be the only consideration. I recall that when the idea
of compressing man pages originally came up on debian-devel, tests
showed that the compressed versions actually rendered faster even on a
486: the reduction in disk access required more than compensated for
the extra CPU used.
Of course this is a different application, so the results may differ,
but it could be worth investigating.
ttfn/rjk
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id 16kYea-0000oO-00; Mon, 11 Mar 2002 15:52:28 -0700
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 15:52:28 -0700 (MST)
From: Jason Gunthorpe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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To: Adam Heath <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Subject: Re: Bug#137709: feature request: gzip /var/lib/apt/lists/*
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On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Adam Heath wrote:
> On a performance note, dpkg has support for reading status/available, either
> with mmap, or with block reads(apt only uses mmap). My performance testing
> showed the difference in speed, with a sufficiently large block size, was just
> noise.
It doesn't mmap, it just random-seeks. It doesn't load the package files
at all, only the portions of records it needs when it needs them. The
shear amount of data in the package files make it infeasible to load them
all at once into ram. That is why the memory footprint is so very small,
which is far more important on older systems than disk usage.
It is possible to store them compressed but it would have to use a
non-standard compression scheme to allow random seeking to still work.
Jason
