Red Hat

Hi. We have several hundred servers that recently received the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 update. One of the differences we noticed is that the yum caches are consuming more space than they were before. The issue appears to be the existence of caches that did not exist prior to the update, and they exist in all four cache directories:

Code:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  30832046 Aug  5 05:26 filelists.xml.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 160432128 Aug  7 12:01 filelists.xml.gz.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  87140371 Aug  5 05:26 other.xml.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 365091840 Aug  7 12:02 other.xml.gz.sqlite

Comparing this to the 5.6 systems we still have:

Code:

/var/cache/yum/rhel-x86_64-server-5:
cachecookie  packages        primary.xml.gz.sqlite  updateinfo.xml.gz
comps.xml    primary.xml.gz  repomd.xml

/var/cache/yum/rhel-x86_64-server-supplementary-5:
cachecookie  comps.xml  packages  primary.xml.gz  primary.xml.gz.sqlite  repomd.xml

/var/cache/yum/rhel-x86_64-server-vt-5:
cachecookie  comps.xml  packages  primary.xml.gz  primary.xml.gz.sqlite  repomd.xml

/var/cache/yum/rhn-tools-rhel-x86_64-server-5:
cachecookie  packages  primary.xml.gz  primary.xml.gz.sqlite  repomd.xml

Reviewing the Red Hat release documentation for 5.7 revealed nothing about this change, and neither did the official yum documentation for this release.

Cleaning out the caches will only remove them temporarily. After a check-in with the RHN satellite, they build back up. Has anyone else experience this behavior or do you know why these new cache files appeared with 5.7?

Thanks.

Update: This is a reported bug, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=729657