YAST2 very slow to refresh repos

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1

When I start yast2 it seems to hang at around 50% (the lower progress bar) while refreshing the repositories. It can sit there for a minute before moving on. Once yast2 has started and I add / remove repos the refresh happens very quickly. It’s only when starting that it gets stuck.

This is something that really only started after I upgraded to 11.2. In 11.1 the progress bar would move cross quickly and you could see the various repos flashing up above the progress bar. I didn’t bother with it too much but it’s starting to annoy me now. It also sometimes just hangs there permanently and I have to abort it.

I’ve tried unconditionally updating the yast stuff but it hasn’t helped. My network connection is fine and I have now problems or speed issues with browsing the repo urls from a browser.

Any ideas on what may be causing this or how I can diagnose this?

2

I had issues on Packman skynet mirrors yesterday.
Does zypper do the same?

3

I had the same problem with the packman repo from skynet. Just use one of the mirrors for packman. You can find a list of available mirrors on the opensuse website.

4

I had what sounds like a similar issue that was solved here it links to a post at this Forum but it also has a further repair to consider.

Hope this helps.

5

Don’t really know how to use zypper :shame: so haven’t tried it.

@MattBClassic, thanks for the link. It seems that they speak about issues with aria2c and ISPs possibly throttling p2p traffic. I didn’t quite understand how you can disable aria2. I tried deleting it with yast but it has a huge amount of dependencies associated to it.

Would switching to the ftp instead of http protocal help? Is there any way to configure yast not to use aria2 or p2p protocols? It’s just taken 7 minutes for yast to start.

6

Using zypper just means using a terminal with root to do your software adminstration. It is all command line driven. Now in the post Zypper lag? - openSUSE Forums
You see the code: export ZYPP_ARIA2C=0 so what you do is to open a terminal get root rights with su followed by root PW and than enter the code.

To make permanent, as FM mentioned, it (the code) needed to be added to ~/.bashrc

Edit: I would not remove aria2c since I am not sure what consequences that may have.

7

Thanks for clarifying. I’ll try that and see if there is an improvement.

8

Just as a reference it took me 5minutes to do a Software management load today without using SM for more than a week (BTW my phone connection went buggy over the weekend so I am only getting 300kbs). Then it only took 30 seconds to load when I waited a few minutes and restarted it.

9

Well I tried

**export ZYPP_ARIA2C=0**

and it doesn’t seem to be making any difference.

The strange thing this problem really started after installing 11.2. In 11.1 the loading and refreshing of repos was very quick.

I’m experiencing the slow repo loading on both my 11.2 machines so implies that it’s something to do with the connection to the servers. If my ISP is interferring with p2p protocols then is there anyway to force yast / zypper to use ftp or something else?

10

In another thread it was writen that there have been server problems at opensuse.org

On my laptop I switched the repos to use one of the german mirrors, no lags at all.

So, it looks like this is not the zypper problem described (that would have been the same for mirrors), but server outage instead.

There also might be something going on on the KDE4 front, that’s slowing down the servers.

11

OK, I’ll try some different mirrors. Are the repo urls from yast2 kept in a config file somewhere so I can do a find & replace on the server names to make the changes quickly rather than doing them one at a time through yast2? I could then also have various configs each with a different mirror preconfigured to easily switch between.

12

/etc/zypp/repos.d

you have to edit each file in turn as required

13

Thanks. I may as well just do them with yast if there are multiple files to edit. I thought they may be listed in a single file.

I switched to a German mirror and it seems to have helped speed up the loading of repos. Still gets stuck on the Packman’s skynet one a bit though. So I’ve just changed that to a German mirror too and will see how it goes.