Duncan has done quick some measurements comparing zypper, yum and smart which show that zypper – the command line tool that openSUSE uses for package management – is now (finally 
not only comparable to yum and smart but even faster.
I would be very interested if somebody would do some extensive benchmarking to see whether zypper is faster overall and handles the corner causes as well.
Just compare: Setup for installation with yum is 19s whereas zypper needs 10s. Creation of meta data caches needs 4 minutes with yum and zypper rocks with 18s.
Memory usage: zypper needs maximal a bit over 18 MB while yum needs more than 180 MB and smart more than 60 MB.
If you run zypper – or the package management GUI applications, you really see that the team has done a great job to speed up and use less memory than before.
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Great
!
Hi AJ,
Is this possible to get zypper as faster as shown on 11.0 by using existing 10.3 ?
There’s AFAIK build service project with the 11.0 packages that should run on 10.3 – but it means changing so much in the system (complete YaST) that I would suggest to update to 11.0 instead. Note also that the backport is not tested.
Is there a tutorial somewhere on how to use command-line zypper?
Couple of years ago I used to use urpmi on Mandrake(Mandriva) and now that I’m running OpenSUSE I’d love to have something similar to it.
Check http://en.opensuse.org/Zypper/Usage or run zypper –help.
Note that the graphical frontends for packagemanagement do benefit as well from the speedup, it’s just easier to benchmark a command line tool
Hi Darkelve,
Maybe this link useful for you : OpenSUSE Survival Guide, What a debian Hacker Should Know when Using openSUSE