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List:       fedora-devel-list
Subject:    Re: F34 Change: Reduce installation media size by improving the compression ratio of SquashFS filesy
From:       Ben Cotton <bcotton () redhat ! com>
Date:       2020-09-01 14:34:43
Message-ID: CA+voJeVvbPRH2u-BcNedcn=yCF7au=74BWOy+YmG8P9XQNPw3Q () mail ! gmail ! com
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On Tue, Sep 1, 2020 at 5:23 AM Frantisek Zatloukal <fzatlouk@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> Saving 142 MBs isn't going to make a huge difference in download times (disclaimer: \
> I don't know how is the internet connection speed in other areas, I have not that \
> fast connection of 200mbps down (slowest possible in my area), so 142 MB saving \
> would make roughly 6 seconds difference myself). 
Just for context, I also have 200Mbps down and that's not quite the
fastest possible in my area but it's basically the fastest residential
connection that people actually get. Most people that I know in this
part of the US have 50-100Mbps and they don't always get it.

The other consideration, apart from raw performance, is bandwidth
caps. I won't pretend to know where places have caps, but I have heard
a lot of Australian friends complain about them over the years. My
understanding, at least in the US, is that providers have largely
dropped the caps in These Uncertain Times[tm], but that can be a
factor for people too.

> On the other hand, saving minutes in the installation process (as seen with zstd if \
> I am reading the numbers correctly) is not only going to help users with \
> installation times, but also us, Fedora QA, with faster testing, both manual and \
> automated (OpenQA). 
This is also true. Certainly it would help *us* to have faster
installation times. I'm less convinced that it's meaningful to the
majority of our users. Totally guessing, but I'd suspect that most (as
in 90%) Fedora users have 1-5 or mayyybe 5-10 machines and they're not
frequently re-installing them. I'd love to see the distribution of
machines per user, but I don't think we'll ever know that in a
reliable sense. But I do think that optimizing the install time is a
meaningful benefit to only a very small portion of the audience. It's
an important portion, though, so we have to decide if it outweighs the
benefit to those who would be better served with a smaller download.

I don't think a 25 second increase in install time will be that
noticeable for most people (though, yes, those seconds add up). What I
think we're missing is beyond the scope of this proposal: a context
for what we're trying to achieve. What targets do we have for build
time, image size, and installation time? With that, we can then make
decisions about how to balance tradeoffs within that context.

-- 
Ben Cotton
He / Him / His
Senior Program Manager, Fedora & CentOS Stream
Red Hat
TZ=America/Indiana/Indianapolis
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