# equery --help equery dlaptop ~ # time equery --help Usage: equery <global-opts> command <local-opts> where <global-opts> is one of -q, --quiet - minimal output -C, --nocolor - turn off colours -h, --help - this help screen -V, --version - display version info -N, --no-pipe - turn off pipe detection where command(short) is one of belongs(b) <local-opts> files... - list all packages owning files... changes(c) - not implemented yet check(k) pkgspec - check MD5sums and timestamps of pkgspec's files depends(d) <local-opts> pkgspec - list all direct dependencies matching pkgspec depgraph(g) <local-opts> pkgspec - display a dependency tree for pkgspec files(f) <local-opts> pkgspec - list files owned by pkgspec glsa(a) - not implemented yet hasuse(h) <local-opts> useflag - list all packages with useflag list(l) <local-opts> pkgspec - list all packages matching pkgspec size(s) <local-opts> pkgspec - print size of files contained in package pkgspec stats(t) - not implemented yet uses(u) <local-opts> pkgspec - display USE flags for pkgspec which(w) pkgspec - print full path to ebuild for package pkgspec real 0m15.014s user 0m0.400s sys 0m0.056s This is on a Pentium M 1.8ghz laptop with 768mb RAM... should not be slow. This actually was a subsequent run... it's slower on first run.
Which version of gentoolkit? On a Pentium III with 128 MB of RAM, I get real 0m6.631s user 0m1.671s sys 0m0.180s with gentoolkit-0.2.1_rc4. Also how fast is emerge --help, both of them are dependent upon a 'import portage' call.
the only thing you can do here is move the --help code above the portage imports after that, any real work that is done by equery requires portage python modules which means that you cant blame equery for being slow
didnt mean to close ...
For whatever it's worth: $ time emerge -pv portage >/dev/null real 0m1.782s user 0m1.579s sys 0m0.198s $ time equery --help >/dev/null real 0m2.357s user 0m2.108s sys 0m0.164s This is with portage-2.1_pre2 and gentoolkit-0.2.1_rc4, and repeating the commands shows similar results. So I don't think it's *just* the import portage that causes delays.
the --help display itself requires a gentoolkit import, which will in turn import portage. So even were you to move the portage imports around ( or late load ) you still get the impact of importing portage. Better to work on that not being such a slow deal, or reworking equery entirely.
