Re: aptitude update and pdiff files

[celejar <celejar@gmail.com>]

On 12 Sep 2006 14:56:11 +0200, Urs Thuermann <urs@isnogud.escape.de> wrote:
> For a couple of month I have seen an annoying change in behavior of
> aptitude update and apt-get update.  Formerly, a couple of package
> files where downloaded which took a few seconds.  Now I normally see
> that aptitude update downloads hundreds of files named like
>
>    Get:282 2006-09-11-1318.15.pdiff [13.3kB]
>    Get:283 2006-09-11-1318.15.pdiff [13.3kB]
>    Get:284 2006-09-11-1318.15.pdiff [34.3kB]
>    Get:285 2006-09-11-1318.15.pdiff [34.3kB]
>    Get:286 2006-09-11-1318.15.pdiff [34.3kB]
>
> and this takes quite long.  From the name I guess these are only
> differences two package files so that less data have to be
> transferred.  However, the overhead of nearly 300 TCP connections
> causes this to take *much* longer on some systems than simply
> downloading the whole package file.
>
> urs

I've been bitten by this also. They recently upgraded apt to download
diffs instead of the entire package list each time. I suppose if one
does apt-get update every day the new system is more efficient, but on
my dialup system where I only update when I need to install something
new, I have the same issue as you.

Celejar