Feature added by: Jason Newton (jenewton) Feature #318807, revision 1 Title: practical steps to parallel downloadinging of updates openSUSE Distribution: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable Requested by: Jason Newton (jenewton) Partner organization: openSUSE.org Description: Yet another night I had to do updates, and 50-75 percent of that time I am watching being squandered away. This goes on year after year (been using SuSE since 2008 after Ubuntu, Gentoo, SlackWare before it in reverse order of usage). With typically over 700 updates equating out to about 60 minutes I think we can establish that updates on OpenSUSE are slow - even provided infinite bandwidth and SSDs. I've cracked open the zypper sources more than once with the intension of starting to rectify this but I cannot find the time to accomplish it. The problem is that the downloading used by zypper needs to be made parallel. The reasons for this are to support overlapping transfers to keep downloads going - there is a significant setup time to start a http based download and it adds up over 700 packages in a typical development installation. It gets worse when patches come up and shift execution to disk, throwing away precious internet bandwidth timeslots. This is the case with zypper (d)up --download=in-advance. The good news is this doesn't have to involve threads. I've taken a look before at adding support of this nature to zypper and while the codebase for zypper is all nice and OOPed, it is super tighly coupled to single task at a time execution. It is however using curl if I recall correctly. Parallel downloading with curl is very easy if already using curl and can be done without threads. Another way to do this without massive complications to the code base are executing a plan of what to do as is current and then entering a special "sync mode" (like rsync for updates) or exporting a shell script or text file of links so a user can download the updates to cache with an external tool designed for efficient batched downloading with pipelining and multiple outbound requests and either isolates the parallel tasks to a local module or gives the problem to an external tool. Zypper, after running this download tool or "sync mode" just sees alot of cache hits and proceeds as normal thereafter. The epitime is having a seperate download thread(pool) and connect it all up over something like DDS or ZMQ. You can build more stuff inhouse if you're into that. As dependencies are resolveed in the download threads, the update is installed in the main thread. This way update installation downloading is performed concurrently or overlapping which is going to be the fastest updates get to be installed. I think the last bit should be put on the roadmap but really this needs addressed and not repeated kicking forever and ever and so I urge SUSE zypper maintainers to provide a practical way for power users and suse admins to do this basically now if they were to go add a factory zypper repo - if this means "sync mode" or script/batch file generation for something like aria2c, that is really not so bad. Business case (Partner benefit): openSUSE.org: Resolving the problem in the right way will increase efficiency on SUSE's servers and reduce time of the update process both for SUSE and user (also read $ and time). Everybody wins and SuSE admins/power users/developers get to spend more time on other tasks. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/318807