We currently had major speed problems with ImageMagick and Debian OS 6 templates of Virtuozzo. The strange thing was that the speed was over factor 1000 slower than on Debian 5 OS templates. We also had this issues with GraphicsMagick on this Containers. The solution is to downgrade ImageMagick to Debian 5 (Lenny) and keep back the ImageMagick packages in Debian 6 Squeeze. Here is the way how this is to be done:

Check “/etc/apt/sources.list” if the line – just this one is inside:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian squeeze main contrib non-free

Then do following:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get remove imagemagick
apt-get install imagemagick

After this edit “/etc/apt/sources.list” and insert only this line:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian lenny main contrib non-free

Run following commands:

apt-get remove imagemagick
apt-get update
apt-get install imagemagick libmagick10 libgraphviz4

Be sure that the ImageMagick package is kept back:

dpkg --get-selections \* > packages.txt

Edit packages.txt and change “install” to “hold” at imagemagick line!

dpkg --set-selections < packages.txt

Check “/etc/apt/sources.list” if the line – just this one is inside:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian squeeze main contrib non-free

And test if the package ImageMagick is kept back:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

This should fix this ImageMagick thing on Debian 6 OS Templates with Virtuozzo.

Thanks to Sergey Zenkov of Parallels Support team for helping us to find this issue. Here is a note of Sergey how to solve this with more charm:

The better approach to install packages of Lenny to the container with Squeeze is to create a custom application template with the repositories of Lenny:

# mkdir -p /vz/template/debian/6.0/x86_64/config/app/imagemagick-lenny/default
# cp /vz/template/debian/5.0/x86_64/config/os/default/repositories > /vz/template/debian/6.0/x86_64/config/app/imagemagick-lenny/default/repositories
# echo {imagemagick,libmagick10}=7:6.3.7.9\* > /vz/template/debian/6.0/x86_64/config/app/imagemagick-lenny/default/packages
# vzpkg update metadata debian-6.0-x86_64 -r

And use this application template for installation of ImageMagick. Also, you can create the `post-install` script for this application template to call `dpkg` to mark these packages as intended for hold.

Have a great day and perhaps a faster one!

br, Christoph