On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: > > 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.
gzip --rsyncable? :)
