With the work done for bug 2420 we resolved some known inefficiencies in the rpm backend for rootfs construction, however this was offset by work done for bug 2614; overall the time taken has increased slightly. We need to profile how rpm is being used and see if we can improve the performance further.
This is going to be very much conditional on what effect Smart has on the rootfs construction performance for RPM; hopefully it will improve things but we'll just have to wait and see.
Bug 3273 captures a performance related problem with complementary installs with the new 'Smart' based install.
Bug 3724 covers performance issues with incremental package installs.
Since there are two other more specific bugs covering the issues, lets close this generic one.
Verified as per above comment.