Slow apt search

VIM3
1

The apt search is very slow in official Ubuntu bionic or focal images. E.g. time apt search firefox takes around 8 minutes!

It seems, it is due to the lz4 compressed indexes in /var/lib/apt/lists. I’ve found a workaround.

sudo nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/02compress-indexes

and replace Acquire::GzipIndexes true; with Acquire::GzipIndexes false;

Then delete and recreate the indexes:

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
sudo apt update

Now the time apt search firefox takes only 2 seconds!

But we are loosing some space, the /var/lib/apt/lists/ folder with lz4 compression is about 245MB, without it is 325MB. So by about 80MB more.

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