Karsten Bräckelmann a écrit : > On Sun, 2009-03-29 at 18:14 +0100, Justin Mason wrote: >> on the other hand, the sa-update architecture can cope with it just fine. ;) > > Heh, true. And he could run sa-update even more frequently. After all, > the DNS answer is cached for an hour... ;) > > The real impact isn't the DNS query, but whenever an update has been > pushed. If everyone would check once an hour, the full load would have > to be shouldered in 60 minutes, as opposed to evenly distributed about, > say, a day... > > It's the same classic problem with uninspired admins, running such cron > jobs strictly at a full hour. >
In most cases, it's not the admins fault. many systems allow adding cron jobs by simply putting a file in a /some/path/hourly and so on instead of editing /etc/crontab (or running the crontab command). This is nice (exceptionally for packages when editing files is problematic), but on the other hand it doesn't provide flexibility for tasks such downloading data from a (more or less) central place. I don't know what the problem is, but P2P may be the answer ;-p
