Comment 58 for bug 635834

Well I'm not convinced this has ever been fixed - since event today - still being a user of T61 - but with SSD and throughput of ~250MB/s I get this:

# echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
# time rpm --nosignature --nodigest -qa | wc -l
3194

real 0m8.205s
user 0m0.697s
sys 0m2.817s

# time rpm --nosignature --nodigest -qa | wc -l
3194

real 0m0.680s
user 0m0.333s
sys 0m0.337s

As can be seen - the second read is significantly faster.

Combine cat & rpm:

# echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
# time ( cat /var/lib/rpm/Packages >/dev/null; rpm --nosignature --nodigest -qa | wc -l )
3194

real 0m2.080s
user 0m0.357s
sys 0m0.860s

# rpm -qa rpm
rpm-4.11.0.1-4.fc20.x86_64

But since being a user of SSD - I'm not really depressed with the performance of rpm/yum nowadays - I'm rather stressed with pointless rewrites of multiple GB of data with the same with often rawhide mass rebuild upgrades....