Goswin von Brederlow wrote: > Maybe I'm wrong but I asked some apt maintainer before how the > downloading works. It should fetch the index, find all the patches > needed from the old Packages file to the current one and then fire off > all the donwlods together using the http keep-alive option. There > shouldn't be a delay between downloads. The patching should work in > parallel with downloads. > > Anyway, that is the theory.
That theory sounds great, but it must have been implemented rather badly. I can confirm that on my system downloading (and processing) even just three days' pdiffs takes about 200% as long as downloading the full files took before. This is on a P3 600MHz 256MB on a 2Mbit/s DSL connection. I have disabled Apt's pdiff "feature" for now.
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