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...and it it used to be far worse. In the old days it was spending most of its time parsing metadata, until the C metadata parser introduced, and later sqlite databases were added to repositories as an alternative for the XML metadata.

I even backported the C metadata parser to CentOS 3 and 4, because it was a whole different experience altogether:

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2007-May/0017...

And yum has always been much slower than apt-get.

I singled out GUIs, because it seems to be so pervasive nowadays, as if the coders couldn't do better.