Using zsync for .deb downloads: initial benchmark results

[Mike Rooney]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Wouter Stomp<wouterstomp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:37 AM, Paul Sladen<ubuntu at paul.sladen.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, 14 Jul 2009, Martin Pitt wrote:
>>> Lars Wirzenius [2009-07-14 19:19 +0300]:
>>> > is a 25% reduction in download sizes worthwhile to pursue?
>>
>> A daily fetch of Packages.gz for main/restricted/universe/multiverse/* is
>> ~10MB (IIRC), times 30 days per month and X million users, this is where the
>> low-hanging fruit is likely to be.
>>
>
> More low hanging fruit: disable the source package repositories by
> default (and provide some easy/automatic way to reenable them when
> needed). Probably >90% of all people never use them and this would
> save tons of bandwidth and time.
>

I noticed this as well; the universe source list is something like
10MB by itself. I think we could check for updates a lot faster if
these were disabled by default but trivial to enable. I think just
commenting them out by default would work fine, anyone advanced enough
to want to apt-get source can handle uncommenting lines in a text file
I would suspect.

-- 
Michael Rooney
mrooney at ubuntu.com