Comment 13 for bug 913615

How much memory do the systems exhibiting this have, and what fs is /var on?

Like said on my own systems I can't reproduce anything but the index-creation/fsync issue, but on a virtual machine with less than 2GB memory the performance suddenly goes down the drain real hard, into the "several minutes" range. What seems to cure it is *decreasing* cache size:

In /usr/lib/rpm/macros change "mp_size=64Mb" to "mp_size=1Mb" (which incidentally is the value it had for years and years), remove the db environment: 'rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*', and performance should be back to normal - at least that's what I see on the virtual machines.

Now to figure out what the heck is actually going on in there...