snap refresh is slow with lots of snaps installed

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄]

alan@hal:~$ time snap refresh
All snaps up to date.

real 0m13.751s
user 0m0.035s
sys 0m0.019s

alan@hal:~$ snap list | wc -l
205

So with 200+ snaps installed, the refresh (which doesn't actually need to refresh any) takes a long time.

Debug log attached.

[Bret Barker (noise)]

This is largely due to assertion fetching. We have some plans to batch those but it has not been a priority yet as most devices don't have such a large number of snaps installed nor is a full refresh usually done interactively.

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey)]

This is still quite a problem. I was giving a demo to a customer today, and it's quite embarrassing to have everyone staring at the projector display waiting for "snap refresh (snapname)" from inside a corporate network with a super fast Internet connection.

[Paweł Stołowski (stolowski)]

Bulk assert refreshes are in progress (close to become available) in snapd.

[William Grant (wgrant)]

Bulk assertion refreshes indeed work well. With 25 snaps installed, from Australia:

wgrant@vanth:~$ time sudo snap refresh
All snaps up to date.

real 0m1.853s
user 0m0.012s
sys 0m0.025s