I noticed last night that my package management system in openSUSE 10.3 was slowing down. It was probably due the growing list of repositories that I have added to Yast. It definitely wasn’t as fast as it was when I first got openSUSE up and running. I really do not use the Software Manager in Yast all that often. I use Smart because it closely resembles Apt.

So I did a quick Google search and found an article on the openSUSE explaining what needed to be done to speed zypper up again. Apparently the database gets fragmented and so does the rpm database from time to time. Since I update packages often and install new ones I thought that perhaps my package database wasn’t as lean as it should be. So this is what needed to be done.

Step 1. Regenerate the zypper database (as root)

rm /var/cache/zypp/zypp.db ; zypper refresh

That may take a couple of minutes

Step 2. Defragment the RPM database (as root)

rpm –-rebuilddb

Run the above command just once. Also, if your RPM database ever gets corrupted (only happened to me once in 5 years) then this command will work for that too.

Now, to test it, go into Yast>Software>Software Management. It should take less time to update before getting into the actual software manager.

Further reading

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.