why does it take sooooooooo long
to update the system?
Because of society. insert joker picture
1 Like
As there’s no installation to speak of, just mounting the package, 99% of the time that passes would be spent on downloading those packages. Is your internet connection slower than it should be? You could show the receive/send graph in ActivityMonitor to roughly track the download speed.
I just ran SoftwareUpdater and it’s fast as usual for me (sitting in Europe).
Or do you see different speeds between updating via SoftwareUpdater and “pkgman update” in Terminal. That would be quite weird…
1 Like
How are you running Haiku? I found that on real hardware and and in QEMU its generally pretty snappy. But in VirtualBox it has a lot of problems, including being astoundingly slow.
While I used Haiku on VBox without much issues for several years, I had a hard time understanding folks mentioning this slowness… That was until I finally made the switch from a Phenom II X4 (where things were fine), to a Ryzen 5, where trying to use the exact same [1] Haiku VBox VM with anything more than 2 cores was just terrible.
OTOH, VMware Player 16, and Workstation 17 work(ed) just fine with 6 or more cores/threads (and with a fresh enough vmware_addons package installed, even smoother still).
On the other other hand… sound worked better on VBox than on VMware 
[1] I just moved my SSD from one machine to the other, no OS reinstall.
Oh that’s interesting. I’ve only run Haiku on VirtualBox on a Ryzen 5. Seems like that might be the bad combination. I also got KDLs pretty regularly and rustc ICEs under memory pressure. They all went away on QEMU on the same system.
It is weird.
After the libxml2 errors started up, I switched to pkgman as seems to be the recommendation (although I honestly didn’t understand the explanation for what it does differently) and I’ve been thinking that it does seem faster than I remember SoftwareUpdater having been.
Obviously, I can’t do a head-to-head test since I only have one box running Haiku but it certainly seems faster.
SoftwareUpdater, pkgman, Repository Preferences and Haiku Depot are all using the same underlying library. In theory they should not be any faster or slower than the other.
One Major difference however is that users of pkgman usually use “pkgman update”. While SoftwareUpdater does the equivalent of “pkgman full-sync”
These operations can take different amounts of time, but atleast the individual downloading of packages should be similar.
1 Like
Also, one thing to consider is the time interval before last update. There has been quite a lot of packages updated last month including some big ones. With a slow connexion, that can take long indeed.
I also get slow updates even though my download as measured on the Laptop is 400Mbps and 30Mbps up. I notice the rate never exceeds 500Kbps during a download.
Is there a closer mirror to New Zealand?
pkgman can seem to take forever sometimes, too, even for something as simple as pkgman refresh… normally works pretty fast (even when it has to download the ~2.5 MB repo file for HaikuPorts)… but sometimes, it just seats there doing nothing, until it eventually tells you:
*** failed! : Operation would block
When I see it taking longer than usual, I just hit CTRL+C, because that timeout is too long, and very, very rarely it works OK once it “slowed down” that way.
I’ve notice something similar when I updating packages… for each package, is can be a lotery if it will start the download (which tend to go well), or it will just end with *** failed! : Operation would block before the next download starts.
My Haiku system is installed on a lenovo.
Haiku is the only operating system on the disk.
There is no intenet connection problem.
My optical fiber provider is very fast.
It is only a Haiku problem.
When I try to update, either via the terminal or the haiku updater,
an innumerable list of application repository problems appears.
This problem is new,
I’ve been using Haiku for at least two years,
but updates used to be flawless and extremely quick.
1 Like
Looking at your screen, it seems like you’re on beta 5, right?
The dev team’s gearing up to release beta 6 somewhere around this month and they are updating some stuff on the HaikuPorts repository. From what I’ve read from the tickets it seems they don’t have the insfrastructure to have two separate repositories, so you get broken updates until everything’s finished.
The way I see it you could either switch to the nightly builds or wait for the beta 6 release.
3 Likes
I do have the same problem, even after a fresh install
We don’t have the ressources at the moment to maintain a nightly and a beta haikuports branch simultaniously. That means when we release a new beta we need to upgrade severall things at once, say we have library A, in beta5 this was version 1.0
For beta6 with newer software we now want to move this to version 2.0, now haikuports has to rebuild all software based on Library A, and this causes the disruption you see.
Unfortunately there is no easy resolution apart from well waiting untill we have finished this process.. in the future maybe haikuports can get branches so we can avoid this.
In your case however, simply use the resolution method of “keep X from excluded repository” or use pkgman update instead of SoftwareUpdater, it is less aggressive about removing packages that can not be obtained at the moment.
5 Likes
Keep up the good work, developers.
Lets hope we’ll enjoy beta 6 soon!
1 Like