When is Presto not worth it?

Living in the Netherlands means that you're one of the fraction of 1% of the people on this planet who have access to very high bandwidth internet connections. Working for a University means that you get even more access to said high bandwidth. Luckily, i don't need tools like Presto to update my system.

I went to update my system, and noticed something interesting. Yum, while rebuilding the rpms out of delta rpms, gives a bandwidth meter on how fast the operation is going, and as it turns out, yum is slower than just pulling random packages from the internet. In some ways, running Presto actually slows down updates when a fast connection to the mirror is available. It stands to reason that in any network running a local mirror, Presto is probably not needed either.

So do i keep Presto enabled? For the time being, i will. The extra CPU time costs my employer money, which i'd rather do than use up someone else's bandwidth. While we're probably talking fractions of pennies here, with the number of Fedora users, such things do add up.

4 flames:

Stefan zei

I have noted the same. I will surely deactivate presto on my netbook because the rebuild there is much slower than the download due to the bandwith.

I am just wondering why it is so cpu intense. I don't remember that from OpenSuse which I used a long time ago on a much slower computer... hence there has to be done some optimizing...

Patrick zei

One very good reason to use presto is that it saves the providing organization some serious bandwidth. Imagine the cost saving for Red Hat if they would need 25% less bandwidth to provide Fedora and/or RHEL updates. For one box/user/"yum update instance" that might not be much but when you talk about providing much smaller presto updates to tens of thousands it's a different story. To me using presto seems like the right thing to do.

Richard zei

Yah, and for updates, I don't think I've saved less than 80% in a session yet, and often more. It's such a marked reduction for the mirrors and Redhat.

Thankfully, it also benefits me, since New Zealand doesn't have the best Internet plans these days.

I do wish yum was faster in general. I mean, it flies on my girlfriend's year-old dual core computer with 4GB of RAM, but on my measely PIII 1.5GHz with 1.5GB of RAM, the lag is prolonged in comparison to apt. I know that this gets dragged out regularly and people want concrete numbers, and some people provide them going "Look, we're no slower!" so I should amend my complaint to its feeling slower.

skvidal zei

presto is using the same tools opensuse uses to reassemble the rpms from the delta rpms. Afaik, we're using the same version of the same tools, in fact.