On 02/27/13 11:35, Philip Brown wrote:
From: Shawn Walker [[email protected]]
pkg(5) optimises for update performance over initial install
performance. I have no doubt that the retrieval of single archive
package files is superior for initial installs.
Personally, I count "installing additional packages, after initial OS install", as
"updates" also.
The most frequent packaging operation performed on customer machines
is updating to the next SRU. Very few machines get packages installed
and uninstalled frequently.
SRUs typically affect a small fraction of the files in a package, if
that package is affected at all. As a result, updating only the
changed files rather than downloading every file in affected packages is
a big win.
Once a machine is provisioned and in production, package installations
are rare - and uninstalls are very rare indeed. I can see this when
I look at the package history of my own desktop machine, which dates
back to 2/18/2009 and stretches across multiple OpenSolaris and Oracle
Solaris releases; customers report the same thing.
We believe - and many of our customers confirm - that IPS
delivers an huge reduction in cost of software maintenance, and a
concomitant reduction in machine downtime. Compare for a moment
downloading patches by hand, manually resolving packaging and patching
dependencies, reviewing patch readme files, taking machines out
of production to upgrade to next OS release - all the steps
required to follow best practices on S10 patching, with what is
necessary on S11:
# pkg update
We made the best practice the default practice in S11 - and it's now
really easy for customers to stay up-to-date with respect to patches.
We continue to look for performance wins in IPS. However, we feel that
improving the available automation and reducing the amount of human
effort required to manage a Solaris instance is of far greater import
to our customers than optimizing for a single, seldom performed task
that happens to be easily micro-benchmarked.
- Bart
--
Bart Smaalders Solaris Core OS
[email protected] http://blogs.oracle.com/barts
"You will contribute more with Mercurial than with Thunderbird."
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important
operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
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