Checking for updates / "retrieving software information" taking a very long time.

[BlackBox222]

Hello everyone,

I am using Fedora 8 and am having a really weird issue that just started popping up. Checking for updates / new software seems to be taking a very long time with the update / GUI package management software (pirut, yum-updatesd).

At boot time, when yum-updatesd is started, yum-updatesd-helper is used to check for updates. Problem is, this process takes an extremely long time (almost 45 minutes). It also appears that an excessive amount of data is being transferred during the process (over 120 MB of data).

Pirut does the same thing, sitting at the "retrieving software information" dialog for a long time (likewise seeming to do the same thing, transferring 100+ MB of data).

The problem doesn't appear to be my internet connection or slow mirrors, since I can still install / update / remove using 'yum' in the shell (of course I have to kill yum-updatesd-helper since it is holding the yum lock during its 'update check' process) in a usual amount of time.

I have tried commands such as 'yum clean metadata' and 'yum clean dbcache'. Running 'yum update' afterwards still works normally (and it did indeed get the updates just fine as I expected). It's just that the higher level tools such as pirut and pip / yum-updatesd are taking excessive amounts of time / transferring excessive amounts of data to do their thing.

This problem just started happening; I have been using Fedora 8 for a few days now. Besides the usual repositories that get added into the system by the Fedora installer (like the install media, fedora, fedora-updates etc), I have also added the livna repository (using their RPM), and the adobe-linux and skype repositories. I had these repositories added before this problem started happening, this problem started happening very recently (in fact today I think).

Any help that someone can provide is appreciated. I'm scratching my head over this one (being a linux veteran in general, but fairly new to Fedora).
Thanks,
-- BlackBox222

[Flyboy917]

Updates / Yum/ Yumex/ Purit/ are not working correctly. Stand by.......

[BlackBox222]

Thanks for the quick reply. I just figured that out myself, when I tried to run pirut again. It gave up after trying all of the mirrors.

And yeah, turns out that the xml package information is kinda messed up (I tried to open repodata/comps-f8.xml as a test in firefox and got an error about closing tags missing and such).

Some of the mirrors don't have this problem. As a short term fix I went into /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo and set it to use the mirrors.kernel.org mirror (which seems to work for the time being). Once I find out that the problem has been fixed elsewhere I'll switch it back to using the regular mirrorlist.

Thanks for the help however!

[kegr]

Same here, i am stuck. Cant update or add packages.

anyone?

[vamped]

It started working for me today out of the blue. "They" must have fixed it.