Comment 23 for bug 651482

 Ok, so almost 10 minutes better ... which isn't much, however I'm now wondering how much time yum is taking and how much rpm.

 I assume you are basically doing "time yum update -y" ... is it possible for you to do "time (echo n | yum update)". Which will test the time for everything upto the download and rpm-transaction.

 Also, more generally, is it possible to get access to the machine you are running this on before the "yum update" is done?
 I can get ia64 boxes from RHTS, but they don't have everything ... and a 5.1 => 5.2 update is on the order of 8-12 minutes (8 for 3.2.17, 12 for 3.0.1).