Re: Stop installing/updating apps in parallel

[Joaquim Rocha <jrocha endlessm com>]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for sharing the Ubuntu side. Please check my comments below:

On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Robert Ancell <robert ancell canonical com> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 10:56 PM Joaquim Rocha <jrocha endlessm com> wrote:

I am sending this to the list to get others' opinions as this changes part of the basic behavior we have right now. And it should not be so trivial to implement either, so if we can avoid keeping both behaviors (i.e. dropping the parallel installation altogether) it'd be better.

Let's hear from the interested parties.

 From the Ubuntu perspective:

- APT downloads are serialised (AFAIK)

- Snaps can be installed in parallel, though some operations will be serialized. e.g. downloading can happen in parallel and security profiles need to be serialized.

- From a users perspective, it probably doesn't matter if the downloads are serialized in GNOME Software though the case of downloading a 300Mb snap followed by a 5Mb snap might be annoying (but could be worked around by cancelling the first and installing it again).

Doing things is parallel is usually the way every piece of software should behave, the issue I am trying to address is that if suddenly you have your users installing 4 apps at a time, and they have a slow computer or low bandwidth, the UX may be terrible. Also, at least for Endless' users, we cannot really leave the responsibility of limiting the number of actions at a time to our users (as they may not have this knowledge).

And on a personal note, the less threads the less headaches for me :)

The code may be similar, though yes, of course less things will be running in parallel.

So I guess what I am interested to clearly understand is: is it more important for Ubuntu users to install things in parallel, or to know they won't overload slower machines?

If we cannot find a strong consensus, one possibility is to have a pool of worker threads that we can limit based on some criteria (num of CPUs, build param, gsettings, ...). The code would be more complex but we do what we gotta do. Richard?

Cheers,

Joaquim Rocha  |  Endless