On Tue, 2006-09-12 at 10:12 -0400, celejar wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.
Perhaps for your dialup connection this is worse, but for one I have it
is better. I would much much rather download 10 files that are 30kB
each than the single package list that is 4MB. If only there weren't so
many pdiff files to download sometimes...