Debian APT Performance Is Becoming Much Better For Incremental Updates

If using APT with PDiff enabled for package diffs to do incremental updates, the latest code should now be much faster.

Ubuntu/Debian developer Julian Andres Klode has made some improvements this week to significantly increase the speed of incremental updates with APT. His optimizations have yielded apt-get being around 10x faster than the older code. These improvements also make APT with PDiff now faster than the default, non-incremental behavior.

Beyond the improvements that landed this week, Julian is still exploring other areas for improving APT update performance. More details via this blog post.