662102 - Making updates to Aurora smaller size - update compression algorithm - Courgette

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 504624

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Vic]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:6.0a2) Gecko/20110604 Firefox/6.0a2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:6.0a2) Gecko/20110604 Firefox/6.0a2

"Rather than push put a whole new 10MB update, we send out a diff that takes the previous version of Google Chrome and generates the new version." ... 

Right now every day there is a 17MB update in Aurora.

"We want smaller updates because it narrows the window of vulnerability. If the update is a tenth of the size, we can push ten times as many per unit of bandwidth," 

Google has open-sourced the Courgette code, so now Firefox can use it.

See: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/28/red_bend_sues_google/

Reproducible: Always

Comment 2

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

FWIW, Mozilla apps already support differential updates, which we call a partial update. So if you keep up to date then there is an update of a few MB, rather than 17 or so. eg in http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2011/06/2011-06-03-04-mozilla-aurora/:
firefox-6.0a2.en-US.win32.complete.mar                                    18M  
firefox-6.0a2.en-US.win32.partial.20110602042006-20110603042008.mar      2.5M  

It's certainly possible that courgette can make smaller diffs, particularly for PGO rearranging libxul.dll, but that's for bug 504624 to look at.

Comment 3

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

V.Duplicate