Over the last few days, I've taken a good hard look at performance issues related to Sabayon and Gentoo. Several people have noted that Sabayon seems slow, so I tested out 3.4e. I noticed that Portage was horrendously slow, and discovered the first culprit - Beagle, a search tool that is enabled by default under Sabayon. I talked to Fabio (the Sabayon guy) about this and he is going to look into disabling it by default in the next release, since it can potentially have such a negative impact on system performance, particularly Portage performance.

However, even without Beagle, it still appeared that Portage was having severe performance issues with emerge -up world. I was using Portage 2.1.3.3 and tried downgrading to 2.1.2.11, and the performance issues went away.

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