[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] Large packages in repositories

[Nathan Wayde]

On 18 August 2010 16:37, Pierre Schmitz<pierre at archlinux.de>  wrote:
[...]
>>
>> -- Sven-Hendrik
>
> You need to keep in mind that's its not just the disk space that might
> cause problems here but traffic and especially bandwidth are. E.g. the
> our mainserver has about 10mbit/d bandwidth including mirroring, website
> etc..

One important issue which hasn't been raised is the fact that the bigger 
the package the longer it takes to sync than 1 package.

Today's sync for me took 53 minutes the previous highest time i can 
remember is about 20 minutes and that was with the recent push of KDE 
4.5 beta? into testing.

I'm lucky in that I don't suffer any issues yet, but I can imagine that 
for other with smaller mirrors with lower bandwidth during this period 
everything else on the server is slowed because of this 1 instance of 
rsync. Not only that, but some of us have contracts to abide by which 
restrict the use of long-running processes beyond reasonable use so 
while multiple syncs can be done as a work-around it'd be nice to at 
least discuss some sort of policy here, even if it's just that  a 
notification should be done on arch-mirrors when exceptionally large 
packages are about to go into the repos.

I'm aware this is a one-off but a few years ago I'd be saying the same 
thing large games being a one-off.