Michael Zucchi complains about yum memory usage, and points python as guilty.
Yum isn’t so yummy after-all. Re-enabled python so i could run yum. Wow 120mb of vm to install a couple of packages. Not bad considering the box only has 128mb. This is crap.
Hmm, should I try xubuntu – or will it be just as crappy and bloated and blighted by python poo?
Since our efforts to make the ZYpp really fast, by incorporating and integrating Michael Schroeder’s sat solver together with Michael Matz’s great work on the solv files and data storage, I never took the time to make a “quick comparison” on speed or memory usage. So lets have a quick look.
These are my repositories:
Software configuration management (openSUSE_10.3) 10.3 - Main Repository (NON-OSS) 10.3 - Packman openSUSE-10.3-Updates Virtualization:VirtualBox home:dgollub KDE:KDE3 Mozilla based projects (openSUSE_10.3) ZYPP SVN Builds (openSUSE_10.3) ZYPP SVN Builds (openSUSE_10.3) home:prusnak 10.3 - VideoLan openSUSE.org tools (openSUSE_10.3) SUSE Feature Tracking Tool (openSUSE_10.3) psmt's Home Project (openSUSE_10.3) openSUSE:10.3 Duncan Mac-Vicar SUSE rpms (openSUSE_10.3) Latest YaST svn snapshots (openSUSE_10.3) building/openSUSE_10.3
All these repos together are about 41.000 packages.
What I did was to symlink ZYpp repositories to the yum repo path so they use the same repos.
# rm -rf /etc/yum.repos.d/ # ln -s /etc/zypp/repos.d /etc/yum.repos.d
Update 14.05.2008 : I did add yum 3.2.14. However it performed even worse, except for memory usage.
Update 15.05.2008 : added smart 0.52 numbers
libzypp is the one you see in factory since some days: 4.21.1.
yum and ZYpp behave differently, as yum downloads and parses filelists.xml and other.xml which we ignore. There fore I skipped the download metadata part and just timed the cache building process.
# yum clean dbcache ... 19 sqlite files removed # time yum makecache ... Metadata Cache Created real 9m41.036s user 2m34.766s sys 0m11.545s
Almost 10 minutes. As this time includes parsing the two big files we ignore. I did it again, pressing Ctrl-C After yum finished with the primary data, which is what ZYpp uses:
# time yum makecache ... Exiting on user cancel real 4m6.730s user 0m34.058s sys 0m3.080s
Now, zypper’s turn:
# time zypper ref -B ... All repositories have been refreshed. real 0m18.472s user 0m16.029s sys 0m2.024s
So yum takes 13 times the ZYpp needs technically (primary 1:1 comparison), but 30 times the time the end user sees.
Now, installing a package. Times were measured till the “continue? yes/no” prompt, or till the first interactive question.
# time yum install fate ... Is this ok [y/N]: n Exiting on user Command Complete! real 0m19.143s user 0m14.057s sys 0m1.920s
zypper’s turn:
# time zypper in fate ... Continue? [YES/no]: n real 0m9.796s user 0m8.509s sys 0m0.624s
This time, ZYpp is only twice as fast as yum. Only 
What happens when you want to upgrade your packages?
# time yum upgrade ... real 0m45.152s user 0m36.894s sys 0m7.476s
(Note: yum did not even found a solution here).
# time zypper update ... Continue? [YES/no]: n real 0m8.988s user 0m7.820s sys 0m0.596s
yum needs 4 times the time ZYpp needs to calculate the upgrade.
Update 14.05.2008 : I was comparing update to upgrade, I fixed those numbers in the chart. However, I don’t have the update value for the old yum.
Summary:
Now, how much memory does each one need? For this, I just tested the install command with one package using valgrind massif, a heap profiler.
yum memory usage:
ZYpp memory usage:
Update 14.05.2008 : memory usage chart for yum 3.2.14
Update 15.05.2008 : memory usage chart for smart 0.52
Here you can appreciate ZYpp goes a little bit over 20M, while yum goes over 180M, so yum uses about 9 times more memory. Update 14.05.2008 : yum 3.2.14 uses around 160 in the worst point of time.
I would be interested in tracking cpu usage too, but that will come later. What do you think about it?
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Very interesting numbers, thanks for the work!
A collegue of mine just asked if there are some numbers comparing zypp with smart… Have you done some testing there, too?
smart seems to be very popular among opensuse users…
It would be also interesting to know how the new libzypp manages the “Case Studies” from http://svn.labix.org/smart/trunk/README
I don’t know, but could be that yum fixed “Case 2″ and libzypp “fails”? So the extra time and memory over libzypp taken by yum to make the dep resolution would be justified.
[...] que la distro tiene muy, muy buena pinta. La gestión de paquetes va fantástica (sobre todo usando zypper frente a yum, por ejemplo) y la verdad es que aunque KDE 4 va un poquito tirado en algunas operaciones con [...]
I have added the smart numbers.
As for the solver, those cases are no real testcases, as they don’t describe what was in the system (like our libzypp-testsuite)
Could you do another test for me please: how does this new Zypp compare to Synaptic.
A friend of mine has an old laptop and will convert to openSUSE if it’s faster than Ubuntu.
Thanks mate!
[...] Duncan Mac-Vicar P. homepage « yum and ZYpp speed / memory usage [...]
We are talking about very simple cases. I don’t think what was in the system is relevant in a test where you create five RPMs with the above spec files, create a repository with them and install ‘A’. There are any real packages that require/provide thing like “C” or “libA”???
License: License Group: Group Summary: Summary Name: A Version: 1.0 Release: 1 Requires: BCD libB libC libD
%description Description
%files
License: License Group: Group Summary: Summary Name: BCD Version: 1.0 Release: 1 Provides: libB libC libD
%description Description
%files
License: License Group: Group Summary: Summary Name: B Version: 1.0 Release: 1 Provides: libB
%description Description
%files
License: License Group: Group Summary: Summary Name: C Version: 1.0 Release: 1 Provides: libC
%description Description
%files
License: License Group: Group Summary: Summary Name: D Version: 1.0 Release: 1 Provides: libD
%description Description
%files
I had problems with the last libzypp on 10.3, so I’m not going to test it at least until 11.0 final. But just tested yum 3.2.14 with these five RPMs… and yum still tries to install all five files when only BCD is needed to install A!!!
For those smart test cases see my new posts:
Solving the famous “smart” case 2
Solving the famous “smart” case 3
( and you will see that you could test those cases yourself
we provide the complete simulation environment )
Great work Duncan!
cool – you have Gravatar support I see
I was very surprised that my home project (home:prusnak) appeared between the test repositories. What was so interesting about it that it made to the list?
If the repo is on your local disk make sure you echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches as root to drop the kernel’s file cache before the start of a run (otherwise later runs may have the advantage of not doing disk I/O)
[...] improvements like the fast installation, how YaST became sexy, how YaST/ZYpp/zypper became fast, how YaST/ZYpp/zypper performs better than others and even that our solver is also really [...]
[...] Zypper is wicked fast, and is now my favorite way to manage packages. All it lacks is tab-completion of package names, but running
zypper se somepackageis so fast that I don’t mind too much. [...][...] után a SOLV fájlokban történt változások, valamint az új solver szignifikáns teljesítménynövekedést eredményezettés kevesebb memóriát igényel összehasonlítva a Smarttal és a [...]
I was asking myself the other day, “Why doesn’t openSUSE just use yum for package management.”
I have the answers now.
zypper still needs some more work, however. I can’t seem to find a way to show the installed packages that require PACKAGE (so that I can remove PACKAGE without upsetting the system), or show what packages PACKAGE requires (to measure how much I will need to download and install before installing PACKAGE).
All-in-all I like the effort openSUSE puts in to create a decent distro.
Felipe