Bug 346579

Summary:	Speed up update process dramatically
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 10.3	Reporter:	Charles LLandemaine <landemaine>
Component:	Update Problems	Assignee:	E-mail List <yast2-maintainers>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:	Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity:	Enhancement
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Charles LLandemaine 2007-12-06 17:35:03 UTC

On my computer, the update process takes more than half an hour. This is not normal. It should be much faster than that. I think there are way too many TCP/IP connections. The initial process of downloading a whole bunch of files to build the new list of RPMs takes a long, long time. Here's what I suggest, make sure this is feasable:

1. Make the list of names and versions of installed applications on the user computer (this list can be saved in a file already so that the computer doesn't have to build it again, and it can be edited only when new software is installed, not to lose time having to build it every time)
2. Compress this list using 7-Zip (ideally) or BZip2
3. Send it to the repository
4. The repository compares this list against its own
5. It builds a list of names and versions of the applications that need to be updated and compress this list
6. It sends this list to the user computer
7. The user sees the list of applications that need to be updated and approves the update
8. The user computer starts downloading the updates and installs them as they are downloaded.


While new updates are being installed, others are being downloaded in the background, instead of downloading and installing sequentially:
1. Download update #1
2. Install update #1
3. Download update #2
4. Install update #2

I think it will be much faster.

Comment 1 Arvin Schnell 2007-12-07 16:04:33 UTC

Where is the server when you update from DVD? Which server does the solving
when you have several online repositories? No, the solver runs on the local
machine.

We are already planning downloads in the background.

Comment 2 Charles LLandemaine 2007-12-07 16:16:46 UTC

When you update from DVD, these suggestions are not applicable, as the bottleneck is the DVD player throughput. BTW, I didn't know it was possible to update from DVD (only installing).

If the user has several repositories to access, his computer sends his RPM DB to all repositories, all of them return their own list of new packages and the computer decides what to update from which repository.

Anyway, as an end-user, I think that half an hour on a fast DSL connection to update the system is way too much. I would expect the whole process to take no more than 1-2 minutes.