Ubuntu
unattended-upgrades package

Please randomise automatic updates over a longer period

Bug #1554848 reported by Paul Gear
46
This bug affects 9 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
apt (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
High
Unassigned
Trusty
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned
Xenial
Fix Released
High
Unassigned
unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
High
Unassigned
Trusty
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned
Xenial
Fix Released
High
Unassigned

Bug Description

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.

Tags: canonical-is
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

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

Changed in unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Geoff Short (geoff-short) wrote :

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.

Brian Murray (brian-murray)
tags: added: rls-x-incoming
Revision history for this message
Geoff Short (geoff-short) wrote :

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

Revision history for this message
Paul Gear (paulgear) wrote :

@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.

Stuart Bishop (stub)
tags: added: canonical-is
Michael Vogt (mvo)
Changed in unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu):
milestone: none → ubuntu-16.04
importance: Undecided → High
Changed in apt (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
importance: Undecided → High
milestone: none → ubuntu-16.04
Revision history for this message
Michael Vogt (mvo) wrote :

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

Revision history for this message
Michael Vogt (mvo) wrote :

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.

Revision history for this message
Haw Loeung (hloeung) wrote :

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

Brian Murray (brian-murray)
tags: removed: rls-x-incoming
Michael Vogt (mvo)
Changed in apt (Ubuntu Xenial):
status: Confirmed → Fix Committed
Changed in unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu Xenial):
status: Confirmed → Fix Committed
Michael Vogt (mvo)
Changed in apt (Ubuntu Xenial):
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
Changed in unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu Xenial):
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Junien Fridrick (axino) wrote :

Hey,

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

Thanks !

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

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

Changed in apt (Ubuntu Trusty):
status: New → Confirmed
Changed in unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu Trusty):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Haw Loeung (hloeung) wrote :

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.

Revision history for this message
Haw Loeung (hloeung) wrote :

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.

Revision history for this message
Haw Loeung (hloeung) wrote :

See LP bug #1686470.

Mathew Hodson (mhodson)
Changed in apt (Ubuntu):
milestone: ubuntu-16.04 → none
Changed in apt (Ubuntu Xenial):
milestone: ubuntu-16.04 → none
Changed in unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu):
milestone: ubuntu-16.04 → none
Changed in unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu Xenial):
milestone: ubuntu-16.04 → none
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