Daniels Blog

Thanks to Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho I could improve the performance of dpkg/apt on my old Ubuntu system (upgraded since I've started using Linux/Ubuntu in 2005):

I've written a small script, according to Antti-Juhani's post:

#!/bin/sh
# via http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/newblog/archives/521

if [ "$(id -u)" != "0" ]; then
echo "You must be root."
exit 1
fi

dpkg --clear-avail
dpkg --forget-old-unavail
sync-available


My results show that /var/lib/dpkg has gone from 195M down to 154M and calling apt-get upgrade (not a good test probably) went down from 10.024s to 5.764s (after dropping all caches, of course - "echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches").

Thanks.

This should get considered to be done during Ubuntu upgrades.