localedef ridiculously slow on low-memory machines

[AlainKnaff]

When installing Kubuntu on a machine with low memory (128M), locale-gen and localedef take up the major part of the installation time.

Localedef takes several minutes per locale, and the whole thing is made worse by the long list of "variants" of english locales that are installed (en_HK, en_IE, ....)

Two ideas of solving this:
- check localedef's algorithm whether this excessive memory consumption (95 Megs!) is actually needed.
- make the list of english locale's *much* shorter (only en_UK and en_US), and only add the others on request

This issue has plagued (K)ubuntu since at leas 7.04

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Dan Kegel (dank)]

Still affects the alternate installer for Precise beta 1 on a machine with 128MB of RAM.

May be a dup of http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=185010
which suggests doing
  echo 100 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
I tried that after half an hour, and after another five minutes, install got past that step,
so perhaps it helped.

[Dan Kegel (dank)]

This looks like a dup of bug 202959