Updating the ports index is slow, but system load is nil

[abu khaled]

try to fetch the ports index before running portupgrade.

cd /usr/ports
make fetchindex
portupgrade <?port?>

On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 01:51:45 +0000, Richard Bradley <rtb27 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Sometimes (not always) when I do a 'portupgrade', it takes _ages_ to "update
> the ports index", without actually placing any noticeable load on the system.
> 
> In ports/UPDATING, it says (of make index) "This may take an undesirably long
> time.". That would be fine, *if it were doing any work*.
> 
> I try to speed it up by "renice"ing all the processes I can pin down as
> belonging to the portupgrade (is there a recursive renice for child
> processes?), but it makes no difference.
> 
> Here's a grab of "top", after I've been staring at
> "Updating the ports index ... Generating INDEX.tmp - please wait.."
> for about 10 minutes....
> 
> PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
> 65942 rich     101    0 37396K 27732K select   0:01  4.18%  2.39% kdeinit
> 62156 rich      96    0 52072K 40144K select   0:04  1.69%  1.56% kontact
>   557 root      96    0   102M 48316K select  15:39  0.88%  0.88% Xorg
> 67154 root       8   -5  7304K  7180K wait     0:00  2.96%  0.54% make
> 67520 root       8   -5   928K   800K wait     0:00  3.00%  0.15% make
> 
> notice that
> a) there's almost no load on the system
> b) I managed to catch some of the make's and renice them
> c) It didn't help
> These two makes soon disappeared from the top of the list, leaving only
> background processes.
> 
> It doesn't have any open network connections, so I'm not waiting for a remote
> machine; it doesn't have any system load so I'm not waiting for processing;
> the hard disk is (largely) idle, so I'm not waiting for i/o, but I am still
> waiting!
> 
> How can I make it stop messing around and get on with it?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Rich
> 
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