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: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.