APT Speed For Incremental Updates Gets a Massive Performance Boost

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.

Comments

Re:Now only...

[wjcofkc]

What's wrong with binary logs?

Text is a terrible format for efficient storage of and access to structured data
Access to binary logs is O(1) instead of O(n)
journalctl outputs a pixel-perfect copy of what /var/log/messages was
You can query more effectively and precisely than with awk, sed and grep
You can still use awk, sed and grep if you want
You can run syslogd in parallel and have your text file as well
The binary format is well documented
Traditional logs are binary as well as soon as they are rotated and compressed

For fucks sake already, can we not have a single Linux related discussion that has nothing to do with systemd without it spiraling into a systemd flame fest? Systemd is not the devil. All I read here from detractors are people who are regurgitating bullshit they overheard while riding the bandwagon they blindly jumped on without actually having a single clue what they are talking about. Talk about the blind leading the blind. Meanwhile anyone with a clue who tries to chime in with a voice of reason is simply drowned out. Does using the word binary in sentence where you also refer to logs make you feel like some kind of super hacker? Sometimes I really think that's what all this never ending bullshit is about.

Re:Bad code is everywhere

[guruevi]

a) Back in the day we did because memory was expensive and these things were to run on 386'es and other platforms that might not have the room for a sizable buffer and memory/bus/CPU bus were all equally fast. You only need a buffer if your machine is busy doing other things)

b) It might be a benefit on certain platforms but in certain situations it feels (without looking at the rest of the code) like the code might introduce a buffer overflow issue (he explicitly removes the zero-buffer option if the file read returns a null pointer as it's buffer).

c) Ask the original developer or do a blame-search for that code before 'fixing' things.