Please randomise automatic updates over a longer period

[Paul Gear]

Load on the main Ubuntu archive servers is rather peakish, and tends to create a traffic peak on our Internet links at fairly regular times each day, preventing customers from accessing the archive. This impacts the cloud archive mirrors using the ubuntu-repository-cache charm also, because they are hitting a squid cache which is backed by the main archive. This effect will be even more pronounced under the recently-announced automatic update policy for xenial.

One solution which would alleviate this to some extent would be to spread the load over a longer period by increasing the random sleep time in the daily update script from 30 minutes to, say, 1-2 hours.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Geoff Short (geoff-short)]

It would be good to have the delay length as a configuration option, I would like to reduce the random delay for some of my PCs which are not turned on very often.

[Geoff Short (geoff-short)]

My apologies - this delay is already configurable using APT::Periodic::RandomSleep !

[Paul Gear (paulgear)]

@geoff-short Thanks!

@mvo (or whoever is looking at this on the Canonical side): Therefore, this bug can be considered simply as a request to change the default value to 2 hours or so.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

I started some work on this in https://github.com/mvo5/apt/commit/4ee4b0b9cbbc64fb0b545f367a4dd8f7a11570b6

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Actually: https://github.com/mvo5/apt/pull/10 - this should make it much more random because there is no fixed "cron.daily" time anymore, its all based on boot time + randomize which should be much more random that what we have today.

[Haw Loeung (hloeung)]

FYI, this also affects our mirrors in various clouds such as Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Compute.

[Junien F (axino)]

Hey,

Are you planning on fixing trusty as well ? That would be awesome. And probably a much simpler fix.

Thanks !

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Haw Loeung (hloeung)]

Any chance of having something similar ported to releases before Xenial (Trusty and friends)?

We're getting alerts for our archive mirrors as well as our cloud mirrors whenever there's USNs for the Linux kernel, Firefox, and a couple of other large packages.

[Haw Loeung (hloeung)]

As per LP bug #1615482, the window has been reduced to 1hr (see https://github.com/julian-klode/apt/commit/93a513c4953bab9b0569c9e2bc2c74075a50dc00) which is still better than the original 30min window. We'll see how this goes.

[Haw Loeung (hloeung)]

See LP bug #1686470.