Re: portage performance

Jesse Guardiani wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> First off, sorry if this isn't the right place!
> I didn't see anything more appropriate though, except
> perhaps Portage-dev, but I'm not a developer.
> 
> I'm a FreeBSD user switching to Gentoo for my home
> system. Linux 2.6 is a LOT more stable than any
> FreeBSD 5.x-RELEASE kernels right now, and Linux
> has much better support for Wine and such.
> 
> One of the most obvious differences between FreeBSD
> ports and Gentoo Portage is how LONG it takes to
> search for ports/packages with Portage.
> 
> I have 525 ports installed on my FreeBSD laptop right
> now, and probably only half of that installed on the
> Gentoo machine, but the gentoo machine crunches a lot
> more doing a --search than the FreeBSD machine does
> with a pkg_version -vs 'name'.
> 
> And forget about --searchdesc! That takes ages!
> 
> Is portage not hash indexed or something?
> 

The main problem is this.... the portage database is a file system based
mechanism. That is to say, when you update, search or otherwise use emerge,
the program is busy as hell leafing through thousands of files looking for
what you want..

"Hashed", "indexed"??? Not even close....

Portage is begging for a decent database engine and I pray it's sql
based....

The other hitch is that portage is written in an interpreted language,
Python. Python is an excellent programming language, no doubt about it, but
performance isn't one of it's highlights. Moving portage to C would be so
much better....






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