Using zsync for .deb downloads: initial benchmark results

[Mike Rooney]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Scott Ritchie<scott at open-vote.org> wrote:
> Mike Rooney wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>
> I thought they WERE commented out by default, at least with new
> installs.  This is equivalent to being unchecked in
> System->Administration->Software Sources.
>

It doesn't appear that way, I just downloaded the Jaunty 64 bit ISO
and created a VM, and they are indeed present in sources.list, not
commented out. The check box in Software Sources is also "enabled",
though it works oddly and doesn't show a check, it just has an orange
background instead of a plain one if you "uncheck" it.

My Jaunty and Karmic boxes also seem have sources enabled by default.

-- 
Michael Rooney
mrooney at ubuntu.com