Quoth Zach: > 0 upgraded, 44 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. > Need to get 906kB/73.4MB of archives. > After unpacking 185MB of additional disk space will be used. > Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y > Get:1 http://debian.mirrors.pair.com testing/main mesademos 6.2.1-1 [807kB] > Get:2 http://debian.mirrors.pair.com testing/main stx2any 1.56-2 [98.8kB] > Fetched 556kB in 2m23s (3862B/s) > Extracting templates from packages: 100% > Preconfiguring packages ... > > [At this point the trouble began and my CPU jumped way up for about 3 > minutes.]
At this point dpkg performs some rather heavy disk actitity in /var. It reads its database which means a lot of random access to the disk > Selecting previously deselected package mysql-client-5.0. > (Reading database ... 310013 files and directories currently installed.) > > [This is where things got really bad and I was over 90% CPU util for > the next 17 minutes!] Again, this is a very disk-intesive part as mysql-client isn't at all too small and also packaged as a .deb, which is essentially a .tar.gz that has to be unpacked. > Any clue what is causing such poor performance and how I can fix it? I don't want to be right, but please check dmesg for I/O Error warnings. I'm suspecting the disk might have some problems. (particularly your /var partition) Aleks
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