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Windows 10 Updates Are About To Get a Lot Smaller To Download as Microsoft Switches To Differential Patching (theverge.com)
Microsoft currently distributes major Windows 10 updates -- Anniversary Update, for instance -- as essentially full operating system installs, going as much 4GB in size. But that is changing starting today (for some users). From an article on The Verge: Microsoft has been promising smaller updates to Windows 10, through various methods, for what feels like years, but the company is now starting to test a new Unified Update Platform (UUP) that will make a big difference. "One of the biggest community and customer benefits of UUP is the reduction you'll see in download size on PCs," explains Bill Karagounis, a Windows program manager. "We have converged technologies in our build and publishing systems to enable differential downloads for all devices built on the Mobile and PC OS." Differential downloads only include the changes that have been pushed out since you last updated a Windows 10 PC. This new change will debut with the Windows 10 Creators Update that's expected to arrive in March, but Windows Insiders can start testing the technology in today's latest build update for mobile devices. Microsoft will start rolling this out to PC builds later this year, alongside HoloLens devices. Xbox One devices running Windows 10 won't benefit from UUP as Microsoft distributes operating system updates to consoles using different methods.
I thought Microsoft got rid of program manager 20 years ago.
I recently helped a friend who kept having Windows 10 chew through all his Verizon bandwidth. They live in a rural area and are unable to get DSL, so they're on Verizon's 5gig a month plan. The Anniversary update along with all the live tiles, Update sharing and telemetry information sharing, completely wiped out their monthly bandwidth limit.
I turned on the metering controls to help with that, but this is even better.
So lets get this right, it's 2016 and instead of downloading complete replacements for the OS at 4GB a piece, we're saving a few hundred meg? Shouldn't these be even smaller? like individual files and executables? maybe even diffs of those files? Is there really any reason they couldn't adopt a mechanism like deltarpm to push updates?
I'm sure those ISP's with datacaps are foaming at the mouth that those caps are gonna be slightly harder to hit now...
OH GAWD
I can't wait to see how they manage to fuck this one up.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It took MS so many years to implement an however obvious differential patching, that says a lot about the code modularity and team management. One could bet and expect the next updates to be problematic.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Windows 10 uses a cumulative patching system. To update a Windows 10 out-of-the-box install to this month's updates you only need this month's update, not every single update that has been released since that CD was made. That's a huge change from previous versions.
The downside of this is that cumulative updates have gotten much larger over time. October's update clicked in at around a gig. That is a lot of data to move around on a network. With this change the computer only pulls down the differences between the last time it patched and today. The hope is that this will take some of the pain out of patching.
Full disclosure, I work for Microsoft in an unrelated group.
Since Windows is a collection of bajillion files, it seems logical that security and bug fixes would only have to replace files changed, yet upgrade downloads were gigantic, approaching the size of an entire OS.
Now it appears MS is confessing that they have been doing it the blunt low-brow way: the entire OS, or something close, came down for every upgrade all this time.
Imagine the collective bandwidth wasted on all that: it alone may have increased Earth's temperature by a degree or two. Does MS own bikini stock or something? I would guestimate Windows updates have made up between 10 to 40 percent of all Internet traffic. Seems a Yuuuuge MS blunder. Am I missing something?
Table-ized A.I.
...is the joy you get from scrubbing the filthy thing off your computer once and for all.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Bloat follows average storage space, and what was bloat 10 years ago fits into a tiny corner today.
SSDs make storage bloat slightly more relevant, as does imposition of monthly data transfer quotas on rural or mobile Internet connections. Or how much has the price per gigabyte for satellite or cellular data transfer allowance dropped over the past several years?