Re: [Fink-devel] [Fink-users] extremely slow 'Scanning dists/stable/main/binary-darwin-x86_64' step on 10.13 with HFS

[Derek H. <de...@as...>]

On 14 Nov 2017, at 4:38 pm, Derek Homeier <de...@as...> wrote:
> 
> On 13 Nov 2017, at 8:44 pm, Jack Howarth <how...@gm...> wrote:
>> 
>> Actually. after wiping my HFS+ volume and doing a clean install of
>> 10.13.1, the issue seems to have disappeared under a fresh bootstrap
>> of fink 0.42.0.
> 
> So you are indeed on HFS+? Then it’s probably not APFS-related; I am rather not looking
> forward to wiping my entire boot volume and reinstall the OS, but I will give the bootstrap
> Fink install a try (can’t seem to pull a JRE installation off via remote login, so this will have to
> wait for me to get back at the machine). I also noticed I probably did not upgrade to 0.42.0
> before the OS upgrade but somehow managed to complete the upgrade without following
> the exact instructions on http://www.finkproject.org; this may have left some things in disorder.
> OTOH I did not notice any other problems arising from the missing Packages.gz file so far.

Uh, as an update/follow-up on this:

I did not do a complete OS reinstall, but performed a fresh bootstrap installation of Fink as
described above, on an APFS volume here. I am still in the process of producing new builds
of all packages from my old installation (currently at ~50%), but while the scanning process
sped up reasonably right after setting up the new Fink, it started moving back to several minutes
after updating more packages. The Packages.gz file at least is rebuilt correctly, but the extreme
sluggishness appears in a different light after I found this in /sw/var/lib/fink:

-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel  37425774592 Dec  2 00:08 scanpackages.db

- compared to a ~11 MB file in the old installation with about twice as many packages.
For perspective, this is over 12x the total size of all .debs or 4x the total installed size of the
Fink system. It’s just been completely rebuilt (taking O(40 min)) after deleting the previous instance
(and had almost blown up my Time Machine before I thought of excluding /sw/var from backups…).

I don’t know much about the Berkeley DB format or the internals of the Fink bookkeeping system,
has anyone got an idea what might be going on there, or could confirm if they are seeing similar
on APFS?

Cheers,
				Derek