Are we patching or reinstalling?

It's wonderful that LL is working hard and pushing out plenty of fixes atm, but am I alone in thinking that a 15-20mb download every couple of days is getting a bit excessive? I'm sure there's plenty of binary comparison/patch libraries out there that could easily be built into the SL upgrade system. Based on the nature of the updates I'd expect it'd cut down the download size a lot too. So, could we pretty pleeeese get a real patch system instead of full downloads?

What difference does it make? I'm honestly curious. We all have broadband connections, it takes me all of 20 seconds to download, and maybe a minute tops to install as well. I'm usually reading the forum and come back to see that it's installed.

Is there an advantage other than download size for a patching system? I'd have thought there would be more danger of bad installs, if perhaps someone misses an update somehow...?

The difference is that in some places (e.g. Australia, where I live) we have a limit to how much we can download each month. It all adds up.

Having suffered on dialup for years before broadband came into ye olde Canadian forest, and being a general phan of elegant efficiently, to have a very "lite" patcher would be nicer than the current implementation. Saves not just our bandwidth, but LL's, especially as the world grows so much bigger.

Another thing which I started thinking about after Seifert mentioned it, is sadly, there's such a YUGE variance between broadband connections. I've come across many Resis on the "lower end" who have high theoretical bandwidth, but live in congested areas (or some other reason) and aren't getting the performance they want.

I'm lurvin' the quick succession of updates, but to download another big chunk when just a few things are changed doesn't make sense to me. Unless there's some overarching technical reason, of course.

I understand why it's an issue for you Kermitt but isn't 20 MB a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of data that's streamed in while you're logged in to Second Life? Looking at it that way it seems pretty negligible.

You're right, it isn't a lot, but like I said it all adds up. But there's a lotta other reasons too. For a start, being a programmer, when I see those downloads so often it just instantly registers as unnecessary traffic to me. Surely the internet is congested enough already isn't it? Also, as Torley pointed out there's more connection issues too. Although I do have cable it's still pretty rare over here. I'd say almost 90% of the people I know here are using ADSL which isn't really that fast in comparison.

That sucks. Now you mention it, I think that's often the deal in the UK too.

So your all wondering why the 20mb download...

It's because LL bundles with the client ever texture and animations used to get though the orientation island with the client install in the static cache. Every time you download the client you are downloading the entire orientation island and every client texture, including the client textures that are no longer used. And some aren't even compressed, they are tga's (but the installer uses compression so it's moot).

It's really quite outragous.

*shrug*

really they should just bundle the essentials and stream the rest. For the Orientation Islands maybe have a bulk asset download at login so texture loading isn't noticed. Also it would cut down on LL's bandwidth costs (maybe 0.1%).