How can we speed up rpm downloads?

[John Summerfield]

Justin Conover wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 12:40 PM, Caolan McNamara <caolanm at redhat.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 17:54 +0200, drago01 wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 5:42 PM, Justin Conover
>>> <justin.conover at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>   At 34MB it still takes
>>>> time, but .deb is 50MB cheaper that the .rpm.
>>> you are comparing two different packages (2.0.4 and 2.4)
>> There's a few other problems with a direct comparison of sizes because
>> they are two packages called "core" with somewhat differing content. The
>> Debian "core" package depends on a "common" package which is an
>> additional 27megs in size. The content of both of these is included in
>> the single Fedora "core" rpm. Additionally the default help content is
>> included in the Fedora "core" rpm, which is available in the deb
>> packages as help-en_US, which is another additional 11 megs.
>>
>> Additionally displaying help itself requires the use of the core writer
>> libraries to render the html help, in Debian this means that the
>> "writer" package is a dependency of help, and that's an additional 6megs
>> in size in its .deb. While in Fedora writer is split into the optional
>> bits called "writer" and the core required for use by help. Shrinking
>> the "writer" rpm by approx 3 megs, and inflating the "core" one by the
>> same.
>>
>> To manually extract the various contents for side-by-side comparison you
>> can use
>>
>> rpm2cpio something.rpm | cpio -ivd
>> vs
>> ar x something.rpm
>> tar xzf data.tar.gz
>>
>> C.
>>
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> 
> Ok, everyone in this thread is replying to OOO, that was not my intent.  If
> you compare the speed of getting updates in debian and fedora, debian is
> much faster.  Forget package size at this point.  Is it parallel downloads
> maybe.
> 
> My main deal here is about the speed in which it takes to download all
> updates and install.  I was merely trying to understand why debian seems to
> be much faster.

To compare.you need to find like-sized packages; the example quoted was 
a bad example. and that's the point discussed.

You also need to find mirrors with equivalent capacity to give you; if 
one mirror uploads to you faster than the other, that's not a fair 
comparison.


yum is very slow to get itself organised, but once it gets underway it 
should download at the same rate.

I don't think either downloads in parallel, and if your internet is 
running at its rated speed, that is likely the bottleneck do running 
two, three or more downloads in parallel will serve only to choke your 
self. And waste server resources.

For a valid comparison, you need to set up a benchmark where you control 
the server, the intervening network, and the clients. And both servers 
need to be identical, and both clients need to be identical.

> 
> I've been a loyal Fedora user since RH 6.2 or some were in there :) so I'm
> not leaving, just trying to understand when i play with it once in awhile it
> just handles downloads differently.

If you download enough that i's an important issue for you, consider 
establishing your own mirror that you update at a time that is 
convenient to you, and/or run your own Squid proxy.




-- 

Cheers
John

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