[gentoo-dev] horribly slow portage updates (fixpackages)

[Alan]

On one of my machines doing a portage update is slow, horribly,
painfully, slow.  The rsync itself is fine, but after that, the
"updating portage cache" is slow, but if there are any packages to move
around with the "global updates" (fixpackages) it is amazingly slow.
Rough calculations gives a minute to two minutes between each "*" that 
indicate some data written on the hard drive.  Slow like I'm using a 286 
to copy gigs of data around.  

The update I'm doing right now has taken 10 minutes or more, and it's 
still just updating one package!

My system is no speed demon, but it's not a slouch either.  Celeron 533, 
128mb ram, with the root partition being RAID0, 2 SCSI 2G drives
attached to an old Adaptec 2940 Ultra SCSI adapter.  

A check of hdparm shows that I'm only getting around 10mb/s transfer
with the RAID, and individually about 5mb/s, but that is typical I 
think of the fact that it's older hardware, but still...

The rest of the system "feel"s just fine.  I can copy a 28mb kernel
tarball in 3.55s within the same drive, and 3.65 to the IDE drive I have
in the system for storage.  Other portage operations, emerging packages
etc also feel fine, and in line with the speed of the system.

The system itself is a webserver that has apache, postfix, squid, samba 
and not much else running (squid is caching onto the root drive BTW).
If it was a windows system I'd be checking for adware running in the
background or defragging my hard drive, but it's ext3 :) The system
has been up for 60 days, so it hasn't been fscked in a while, but based
on what I've seen of linux filesystems, it's not a defrag issue :)

Any thoughts?   Specs and benchmarks below.  If anyone can suggest a 
way to speed this up, or a suggestion as to why it would be so slow, 
I'd be most appreciated.

hdparm -tT on /dev/root (raid0) /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1
---------------------------------------------------
 /dev/root:
  Timing buffer-cache reads:   160 MB in  2.00 seconds =  80.00 MB/sec
  Timing buffered disk reads:   32 MB in  3.18 seconds =  10.06 MB/sec

/dev/sda1:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   184 MB in  2.00 seconds =  92.00 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   16 MB in  3.13 seconds =   5.11 MB/sec

/dev/sdb1:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   184 MB in  2.01 seconds =  91.54 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   14 MB in  3.00 seconds =   4.67 MB/sec

dmesg
-----
scsi0 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.8
        <Adaptec 2940 Ultra SCSI adapter>
        aic7880: Ultra Wide Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 16/253 SCBs
 
  Vendor: SEAGATE   Model: ST32155W          Rev: 0528
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
(scsi0:A:1): 40.000MB/s transfers (20.000MHz, offset 8, 16bit)
  Vendor: Quantum   Model: XP32150W          Rev: L915
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
(scsi0:A:3): 20.000MB/s transfers (10.000MHz, offset 8, 16bit)
scsi0:A:1:0: Tagged Queuing enabled.  Depth 253
scsi0:A:3:0: Tagged Queuing enabled.  Depth 253
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 1, lun 0
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi0, channel 0, id 3, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 4197405 512-byte hdwr sectors (2149 MB)
 /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target1/lun0: p1 p2
SCSI device sdb: 4199760 512-byte hdwr sectors (2150 MB)
 /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target3/lun0: p1 p2


TIA


-- 
Alan <alan@×××××.org> - http://arcterex.net
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are only 3 real sports: bull-fighting, car racing and mountain 
climbing. All the others are mere games."                -- Hemingway

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