Package: libc6 Version: 2.5-11 Severity: normal Since #374945 has been closed and indeed archived, the patch fixing it has been backed out. I can't reopen that bug, but please consult http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=374945.html for the background information.
Essentially, ldconfig is run after every lib*.deb package is updated in a dpkg run. This can be hundreds of times in a move between debian releases. After each time ldconfig is run, on machines with less than about 256MB, everything ldconfig dealt with has long been purged out of filesystem cache by the time the next package comes along to run ldconfig (on my 256MB machine, dpkg can be updating two library packages successively, and nothing remains in cache by the time the second library has installed its files and runs its postinst scripts). So when everyone claims that it's not so bad that ldconfig is run multiple times, because the second time is always much quicker, they are operating under the hidden false assumption that everyone is blessed with a machine with more than 256MB. They didn't even become universally common until about a year ago in these quarters and I still see plenty of new machines with only 256MB on dell's website. Now the cause of the problem is that for every ldconfig call that ought to just update the symlinks of the one package in question, and perhaps update the ld.so.cache file (although on a quick glance through an strace call to a typical program, that appears entirely unnecessary), an open(), fstat64(), and crucially, a mmap() and hence presumably, slurping in some of that file's contents, is done on every file in every lib directory. All of that, for every file, has to fit in cache, if the second invocation to ldconfig a few seconds later is going to take any less time than the first. -- System Information: Debian Release: lenny/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.20-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_AU, LC_CTYPE=en_AU (charmap=ISO-8859-1) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages libc6 depends on: ii libgcc1 1:4.2-20070627-1 GCC support library libc6 recommends no packages. -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
