On Sat, 2018-11-17 at 14:43 -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Jonathan Dieter <jdieter(a)gmail.com> said:
> The benefit of zchunked rpms is that, when downloading an updated rpm,
> you would only need to download the chunks that have changed from
> what's on your system.
How well do web servers and caches handle range requests? I haven't
really paid attention to range requests in a long time; at one point
IIRC mirrors would often disable them because of "download accelerators"
that would open multiple connections to download parts of the same ISO
in parallel (hogging server resources).
When I did the original POC testing, out of Fedora's 150 mirrors, 3
didn't support range requests at all and 3 supported a limited number
of ranges in a single http request.
Zchunk doesn't open extra connections to the server, but instead
combines as many ranges as the server supports into a single request.
Currently, if a server doesn't support ranges, zchunk will just
download the full file, but this could be changed to try a different
server.
Jonathan