Responsiveness testing through dpkg

[John McCabe-Dansted]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 5:45 AM, Chase Douglas <chase.douglas at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I'm interested in doing some desktop responsiveness testing, and I've
> found that when I have a large number of packages to install/update it
> kills my desktop responsiveness not only during installation, but also
> for quite a bit of time afterwards. Desktop responsiveness is a rather
> nebulous issue, one that occurs in different situations on different
> hardware in different ways. However, apt-get/dpkg seem to do a good
> job of causing desktop slowdowns across many configurations :).
>
> What I would like to do is find a good test case I can run on bare
> hardware (not in a VM with snapshot capabilities) that is
> reproducible. I think doing a reinstallation of a set of packages, say
> ubuntu-desktop, would work well. Is there a safe way to do this?

I imagine

sudo aptitude reinstall texlive texlive-base texlive-base-bin
texlive-base-bin-doc texlive-common texlive-doc-base
texlive-extra-utils texlive-fonts-recommended
texlive-fonts-recommended-doc texlive-generic-extra
texlive-generic-recommended texlive-humanities texlive-humanities-doc
texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-base-doc texlive-latex-extra
texlive-latex-extra-doc texlive-latex-recommended
texlive-latex-recommended-doc texlive-math-extra texlive-pictures
texlive-pictures-doc texlive-pstricks texlive-pstricks-doc

would give dpkg a good workout without risking damage to any vital
part of the system.

Also since others mention that fsync may be related, I wonder: does
this problem seem to be ext3 or ext4 specific?

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted