ZMD slow in response to rug commands

  • 7006094
  • 25-May-2010
  • 30-Apr-2012

Environment


Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 (OES 2) Linux
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10

Situation

"rug" commands or "zen-updater" actions take a long time to finish.

A possible cause seems to be the fragmentation of zmd's sqlite DB (/var/lib/zmd/zmd.db). The symtom occurs especially on systems which have quite a large number of update catalogs assigned, like on OES2. On such systems the zmd database grows quite big and gets fragmented. This causes the ZMD helpers to become slow, causing in turn ZMD to be slow.

Resolution

As a workaround the /var/lib/zmd/zmd.db can be removed and zmd restarted afterwards. This will cause the database to be re-created as defragmented. However this step does not have to be done manually. Just lower the zmd preference max-database-age from value 7 (which is the default) to value 1:

# rug set max-database-age 1

With this setting ZMD will re-create the database everyday in stead of every seven days.