Comment 3 for bug 513060

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 04:12:23AM -0000, Eric Hammond wrote:
> FYI, the reason I did not include the apt package index in the original
> Ubuntu AMIs on EC2 was because:
>
> - it increased the size of the AMI by 40%,
>
> - there is a strong correlation between the AMI size and load time
> (pending to running), and
>
> - users should almost always "apt-get update" before upgrading or
> installing packages.
>
> On my Hardy ami-c4f615ad, disk usage goes from 393 MB to 553 MB with
> "apt-get update" (increase of 160 MB or 41%).

Something else must be going on here. The package list is simply not that
large.

> On the Karmic ami-1515f67c, disk usage goes from 548 MB to 576 MB with
> "apt-get update (increase of 28 MB or 5%) so it is not as big of a deal.
>
> On the other hand, perhaps this is an indication of extra files left on the new Karmic images which might not be needed and which could be removed to speed up their startup time on EC2. Here's a couple sets of files for consideration with sizes on a fresh Karmic instance:
> 13M /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin
> 34M /var/lib/apt/lists

Those numbers look more realistic.

--
 - mdz