I have recently been working on a new small project, an API to query the information stored in the meta-data present in the RPM repositories (Fedora's and EPEL's).

These meta-data include, package name, summary, description, epoch, version, release but also changelog, the list of all the files in a package. It also includes the dependencies information, the regular Provides, Requires, Obsoletes and Conflicts but also the new ones for soft-dependencies: Recommends, Suggests, Supplements and Enhances.

With this project, we are exposing all this information to everyone, in an easy way.

mdapi will check if the package asked is present in either of the updates-testing, updates or release repositories (in this order) and it will return the information found in the first repo where there is a match (and say so) So for example: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/mdapi/f23/pkg/guake?pretty=True*

shows the package information for guake in Fedora 23, where guake has been updated but the latest version is in updates not updates-testing. Therefore it says "repo": "updates".

The application is written entirely in python3 using aiohttp which is itself based on asyncio, allowing it to handle some load very nicely.

Just to show you, here is the result of a little test performed with the apache benchmark tool:

    $ ab -c 100 -n 1000 https://apps.fedoraproject.org/mdapi/f23/pkg/guake
    This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1663405 $>
    Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
    Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
    
    Benchmarking apps.fedoraproject.org (be patient)
    Completed 100 requests
    Completed 200 requests
    Completed 300 requests
    Completed 400 requests
    Completed 500 requests
    Completed 600 requests
    Completed 700 requests
    Completed 800 requests
    Completed 900 requests
    Completed 1000 requests
    Finished 1000 requests
    
    
    Server Software:        Python/3.4
    Server Hostname:        apps.fedoraproject.org
    Server Port:            443
    SSL/TLS Protocol:       TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256,4096,128
    
    Document Path:          /mdapi/f23/pkg/guake
    Document Length:        1843 bytes
    
    Concurrency Level:      100
    Time taken for tests:   41.825 seconds
    Complete requests:      1000
    Failed requests:        0
    Total transferred:      2133965 bytes
    HTML transferred:       1843000 bytes
    Requests per second:    23.91 [#/sec] (mean)
    Time per request:       4182.511 [ms] (mean)
    Time per request:       41.825 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
    Transfer rate:          49.83 [Kbytes/sec] received
    
    Connection Times (ms)
                  min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
    Connect:      513  610 207.1    547    1898
    Processing:   227 3356 623.2   3534    4025
    Waiting:      227 3355 623.2   3533    4024
    Total:        781 3966 553.2   4085    5377
    
    Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
      50%   4085
      66%   4110
      75%   4132
      80%   4159
      90%   4217
      95%   4402
      98%   4444
      99%   4615
     100%   5377 (longest request)

Note the:

    Time per request:       41.825 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

We are below 42ms so (0.042 second) to retrieve the info of a package in the updates repo and that's while executing 100 requests at the same time on a server that is in the US while I am in Europe.




  • Note the ?pretty=True in the URL, this is something handy to view the JSON

returned but I advise against using it in your applications as it will increase the amount of data returned and thus slow things down.

Note2: Your mileage may vary when testing mdapi yourself, but it should remain pretty fast!