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I was recently in a situation where I had limited bandwidth (20GB per month) so I was wondering what Linux distributions (desktop or server) have low bandwidth requirements as far as updates are concerned. I still want to stay fairly up to date--but, for example, having a package or kernel update a few times a year would be better than having it update several times a month. The fewer megabytes used up by updates per month would be ideal.

Benjamin Bryan
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    You could simply just run updates once a month! – Michael Hampton Sep 23 '14 at 03:41
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    @Michael Hampton from a security point of view that would be crazy. Updates are made available for a reason. Install them when you can. – captcha Sep 23 '14 at 03:47
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    @captcha I install updates _daily_. But for many enterprises, monthly updates are considered "frequent"... – Michael Hampton Sep 23 '14 at 03:48
  • @Michael Hampton True, one other thing I wanted to mention is the role the machine in the OP's question would have. If he can afford certain insecurities it may be a sensible approach to not update so frequently.. – captcha Sep 23 '14 at 03:53

2 Answers2

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Recent Red Hat-based distributions (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora) also distribute updates as binary deltas, changes from the installed package to the new package. This can result in a bandwidth savings of as much as 90% when installing updates (just make sure deltarpm is installed to take advantage of it).

Consider this example from CentOS 7.0: firefox. The original Firefox 24.5 package is 49 MB, the Firefox 24.7 package is 50 MB, but the delta RPM that updates Firefox 24.5 to 24.7 is 6 MB.

Original RPM:

-rw-rw-r--. 1 mirror mirror 50498824 Jul  3 21:20 firefox-24.5.0-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm

Update RPM:

-rw-rw-r--. 1 mirror mirror 51092008 Jul 22 21:46 firefox-24.7.0-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm

Corresponding delta RPM:

-rw-rw-r--. 1 mirror mirror 6508380 Aug  6 10:42 firefox-24.5.0-1.el7.centos_24.7.0-1.el7.centos.x86_64.drpm

If you use the yum command line tool to update your system, it will tell you how much bandwidth you saved. For example:

Delta RPMs reduced 64 M of updates to 9.5 M (85% saved)
Michael Hampton
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  • That is really neat.. – captcha Sep 23 '14 at 03:54
  • Moreover, stable distros such as CentOS, RHEL or other LTS-type distros will have a lower update rate than Fedora, Ubuntu (except LTS), ... – tonioc Sep 23 '14 at 06:43
  • I imagine source deltas would be smaller than binary deltas. So there might be even more savings to be had, if one can afford the resources needed to compile everything locally. – kasperd Sep 23 '14 at 11:47
  • @kasperd Almost nobody distributes updates to their software as diffs, except in very special circumstances. It's not a general solution. Gentoo doesn't even do that. – Michael Hampton Sep 23 '14 at 11:49
  • @MichaelHampton Aren't most source control systems effectively distributing updates as a series of diffs? – kasperd Sep 23 '14 at 12:22
  • @kasperd Yes, but most people don't get their software directly from the developer's git repo. – Michael Hampton Sep 23 '14 at 12:27
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It all depends on how many applications (or services) you have installed and whether you're running a stable or 'bleeding edge' distribution.

For instance, my Debian Wheezy (on Raspberry Pi) home server that runs openvpn, apache, php, mysql, xorg and not much more only did about 140MB of downloads last month and I would consider that a lot. Most months it's about 10-20MB.

captcha
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