Patchadd performance - comp.unix.solaris

Message from discussion Patchadd performance

Daniel Rock

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More options Aug 27 2007, 7:28 am

Newsgroups: comp.unix.solaris

From: "Daniel Rock" <v200...@deadcafe.de>

Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 11:28:07 +0000 (UTC)

Local: Mon, Aug 27 2007 7:28 am

Subject: Re: Patchadd performance

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Tim Bradshaw <tfb+goo...@tfeb.org> wrote:
> Is there any simple reason why patching Solaris takes *so* long?

Problematic are jumbo patches, and with Solaris 10 patches to
Python, PostgreSQL, etc. if they upgrade the package to a newer release

For instance a PostgreSQL patch has to remove all files in
/usr/share/doc/pgsql/8.1.x and other locations (almost 1000) via removef
manually. Each invocation of removef rewrites /var/sadm/install/contents
completely. This file is on my machine almost 30MB large. So during
patching of PostgreSQL over 20GB is written just to
/var/sadm/install/contents.

You can try the following at the risk of corrupting the package database
(which could be manually correctable) if the machine crashes during
patchadd:

cp -p /var/sadm/install/contents /tmp/contents
mount -F lofs /tmp/contents /var/sadm/install/contents

[patchadd]

umount /var/sadm/install/contents
cp -p /tmp/contents /var/sadm/install/contents

Patching should now be faster since everything written to
/var/sadm/install/contents should now be written to tmpfs.

--
Daniel

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