Using zsync for .deb downloads: initial benchmark results

[Lars Wirzenius]

ti, 2009-07-14 kello 18:51 +0200, Wouter Stomp kirjoitti:
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 6:19 PM, Lars Wirzenius<lars at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > Before I continue working on this, I'd like to have some feedback on
> > this: is a 25% reduction in download sizes worthwhile to pursue?
> 
> Are there any other ways to make the updates smaller (>25%)? Delta
> rpm's in fedora typically give savings of 60-90%. Would a similar
> mechanism be feasible for Ubuntu?

That's something I'm looking at next.

The consensus seems to be that 25% reduction is really bad, and I agree.

The problem with deltas is that there either need to be a lot of them,
or people will not have the suitable one.

I'm told the archive for full mirror is already around 250 000 files,
and that it would be bad to come up with a solution that increases the
number of files a lot. Having a delta file for each deb would probably
not be possible. (We might only be able to support deltas for -security,
and perhaps -updates and -proposed, not for release-to-release upgrades,
or within a development release.)

But we'll see. First we need to find ways to actually reduce the size of
the download of the updates to something impressive.