Update utility

[Colin Percival]

[Please CC on replies, I don't subscribe to -questions]

racerx at makeworld.com wrote:
 >I'm interested in the time it takes to do the freebsd-update, and if
 >rebooting is needed.
 >
 >Can someone post experiences and approximate run times?

   Rebooting is necessary if there's a kernel update; it is recommended
if shared libraries are modified, since that's the easiest way to make
sure that you don't have any daemons which are still using the old
libraries.
   Approximate run times... somewhere around 2-5 seconds plus download
time; for a single advisory, the total time will probably be under 30
seconds, while a more significant update (say, 12 months of updates to
FreeBSD 4.7, or the 5.2 -> 5.2.1 update) might be as much as 5 minutes.
Connection speed is remarkably insignificant here -- FreeBSD Update
uses binary diffs (why doesn't anyone else do this?) to reduce update
sizes by a factor of 50, to the point where most of the time is spent
on HTTP/TCP round trip times.

Colin Percival