Today I spent some hours implementing nice tab-completion for zypper. There was already a lot done 6 years ago, but the part about installing/removing packages was missing.

Now the thinking part is about the speed. For the tab-completion I needed a list of installed packages and of course we have that in our RPM database (using berkeley DB as a backend). However querying the list with rpm -qa already took over a second on a modern and fast system. On my poor netbook with a cold cache, it took 25 seconds (5 secs on second try with hot cache)… And the point is that you probably do not want to wait 5 seconds for your tab-completion to react.

So to avoid this problem, I used caching via make to produce a better format (plain text). This is then post-processed with sed in a fraction of a second – a speedup factor somewhere between 15 and 150. This makes a big difference.

In the end, I still wonder why plain text is so much faster than a DB. I guess, one reason is that the DB is optimized for retrieval of single values – e.g. rpm -q bash – this is very fast (but even there an egrep “^bash-[^-]+-[^-]+$” is more than twice as fast).

I still want to optimize zypper for better speed, so that a search might some day return in under 2 seconds. One idea for that is to not parse all those config+repo files every time, but only when they change. It could use mmaped files under /var/cache/zypp* as memory to store the binary representations. Though it might become complicated, if dynamic structures such as linked lists are involved.

The future will be interesting…