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APT Speed For Incremental Updates Gets a Massive Performance Boost

Posted by timothy on from the just-the-bit-I-missed dept.

jones_supa writes: Developer Julian Andres Klode has this week made some improvements to significantly increase the speed of incremental updates with Debian GNU/Linux's APT update system. His optimizations have yielded the apt-get program to suddenly yield 10x performance when compared to the old code. These improvements also make APT with PDiff now faster than the default, non-incremental behavior. Beyond the improvements that landed this week, Julian is still exploring other areas for improving APT update performance. More details via his blog post.

3 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Bad code is everywhere by mveloso · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wow, reading one byte at a time unbuffered? Who does that in real life? It's been well-known for like 30 years that buffered reading is an order of magnitude faster than byte-at-a-time - which matches the above result. The standard C library does buffered reads, unless you turn them off explicitly.

    Did someone really turn that off explicitly? Why?

    Jesus, someone should check the XML parsers. Maybe the same guy wrote an XML parser and it's doing byte reads.

  2. APT! APT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    Apt appters apdate with APT, not luddite source!

    APTERS APTERS APTERS

  3. Re:Many thanks by jaklode · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm reading everything :)