On 16/2/24 12:16, Thomas Reichel wrote:
Hi Allan,
I ran a fairly comprehensive test over random sets of packages of varying lengths across varying mirrors to simulate different bandwidths and latencies and my result is that for 10-100 packages the geometric mean ratio of download times between the unpatched and patched versions of pacman is between 0.98 to 1.02 with 95% confidence-- which is to say this has virtually no effect on typical performance.
This patch may have a statistically significant effect on very very large numbers of packages, like my initial test where I downloaded about 3000 packages all at once, but that is hard to get a confidence interval on because it would require repeatedly doing 14+ GB downloads. I got an email from my ISP when I ran the tests with just 10-100 packages, so I won't be running the 1000 package tests any time soon. Not to mention that the typical update does not contain thousands of packages.
Maybe if the number of packages in an typical user's `pacman -Syu` increases dramatically over time we can revisit this, but until then I think the current behavior is ideal.
Thanks - great to have some benchmarks done! I am really surprised it made near zero difference. Cheers, Allan