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I was recently in a situation where I had limited bandwidth (20GB per month) so I was wondering what Linux distributions (desktop or server) have low bandwidth requirements as far as updates are concerned. I still want to stay fairly up to date--but, for example, having a package or kernel update a few times a year would be better than having it update several times a month. The fewer megabytes used up by updates per month would be ideal.

Benjamin Bryan
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2 Answers2

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Recent Red Hat-based distributions (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora) also distribute updates as binary deltas, changes from the installed package to the new package. This can result in a bandwidth savings of as much as 90% when installing updates (just make sure deltarpm is installed to take advantage of it).

Consider this example from CentOS 7.0: firefox. The original Firefox 24.5 package is 49 MB, the Firefox 24.7 package is 50 MB, but the delta RPM that updates Firefox 24.5 to 24.7 is 6 MB.

Original RPM:

-rw-rw-r--. 1 mirror mirror 50498824 Jul  3 21:20 firefox-24.5.0-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm

Update RPM:

-rw-rw-r--. 1 mirror mirror 51092008 Jul 22 21:46 firefox-24.7.0-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm

Corresponding delta RPM:

-rw-rw-r--. 1 mirror mirror 6508380 Aug  6 10:42 firefox-24.5.0-1.el7.centos_24.7.0-1.el7.centos.x86_64.drpm

If you use the yum command line tool to update your system, it will tell you how much bandwidth you saved. For example:

Delta RPMs reduced 64 M of updates to 9.5 M (85% saved)
Michael Hampton
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It all depends on how many applications (or services) you have installed and whether you're running a stable or 'bleeding edge' distribution.

For instance, my Debian Wheezy (on Raspberry Pi) home server that runs openvpn, apache, php, mysql, xorg and not much more only did about 140MB of downloads last month and I would consider that a lot. Most months it's about 10-20MB.

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