> Hi all > > I'm hoping somone can help me with a little Debian problem. > > The problem is that when I try to install packages (either through > apt-get or using dpkg directly), dpkg seems to take a *long* time > at the "Unpacking" stage. (Long == many minutes).
For the archives, The problem was that dpkg does a lot of calls to getpwnam() to look up which uid to install files as. (Thanks to Ian for reminding me about strace()!). This was a problem for me because names are lookup from an ldap server, which takes a significant amount of time when you are installing hundreds of files, each of which requires a user name lookup. The solution is to install nscd, which caches these lookups. (Thanks to jaq for telling me about that one!). Cheers, Benno (back to lurking) -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
