Hi everybody, yesterday I ran 'pkg image-update' on an OpenSolaris running in a VirtualBox. The VirtualBox runs on a laptop and serves as a testing environment for small programs and reading man pages. So I only allocated 512MB of RAM for this machine (no graphical desktop, etc.), which is more than enough for this purpose, even with / on ZFS. Anyway, the 'pkg image-update' ran for a while and the it looked like it got stuck (the spinning dash stopped spinning). So I opened up sysstat and saw scanrate being >50k and paging going on like crazy with pkg being the only user process currently running. So I took a look at prstat and saw pkg was almost consuming 400MB of RAM.
Hmm - I wouldn't dare calling pkg bloatware, because pkg does a real good job and is fast, too, but 400MB of RAM just to determine which packages need to be downloaded?! The program wasn't even at the stage of installing, it was just creating its plan for update... So it really would be nice if it wasn't that hungry for memory. The workaround on a VirtualBox is of course very easy (just restart with more memory). I retried with 900MB and it updated without a problem. So that hardens the impression that OpenSolaris needs at least one Gig of RAM. So maybe it would be worth sending pkg on a diet... Just my $0.02. Cheers, Thomas -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
