Checking for updates eats bandwidth..

[Ravi5kumar]

Why the hell the apt command:

sudo apt-get update

Always eats my precious bandwidth (20-25 MB). I am annoyed because whenever I check for updates or add a third party repository I have to type this command and it just eats...

[vasa1]

Why the hell the apt command:

sudo apt-get update

Always eats my precious bandwidth (20-25 MB). I am annoyed because whenever I check for updates or add a third party repository I have to type this command and it just eats...

Maybe you have too many sources? And you have ticked source code?

Go into update manager and maybe you can untick a lot of stuff?

[PaulW2U]

Why the hell the apt command:

sudo apt-get update

Always eats my precious bandwidth (20-25 MB). I am annoyed because whenever I check for updates or add a third party repository I have to type this command and it just eats...

This has been raised by quite a few users elsewhere and has got worse with the release of Ubuntu 12.04. A bug report has been raised although I can't provide a link to it at present. You are not alone with your concerns.

You might be able to reduce the download a little though. Do you have any repositories enabled that you don't really need such as Backports, Proposed Updates or Source Code? My download never goes above 17MB.

Edit: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1001780 is the bug report I was referring to. It's shown as fixed although I still feel a check for updates consumes far more bandwith than it used to.

[elliotn]

yeah 12.04 update its lots of bandwidth. I have no extra repo

[mips]

Yes it got worse with 12.04 and I suspect it's due to multi-arch where you now get i386 & AMD64 stuff.

Besides that we also need deb-deltas. If this does not happen soon in debian based distros I'm moving to Fedora that offers DeltaRPM. It's not rocket science.

Unfortunately bandwidth is not cheap in all countries including mine.

[doorknob60]

Wow. Hate to say this, but glad I don't use Ubuntu, because we constantly go over the bandwidth cap here (it's 150 GB which is pretty generous, but we still go over. 5 family members...) Just to update the repos in Arch uses nowhere near that amount. Although keeping up to date packages probably eats up a lot in a rolling release though...whatever

[mips]

Although keeping up to date packages probably eats up a lot in a rolling release though...whatever

And that is the only reason why I don't use Arch right now. It's still my favourite distro though.