[Bug 1615482] Re: apt-daily timer runs at random hours of the day

[Haw Loeung]

There's usually 3 main windows where the archive servers are under heavy
load. EU, UK/UTC, and US east. The UTC 0630 - 0700 window is usually the
biggest hit.

For the cloud argument, people run CI jobs spinning up new instances in
the cloud. Tools such as cloud-init and juju will normally run apt-get
dist-upgrade on boot to ensure instances are up-to-date.

One such example is LP bug #1561173.

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Title:
  apt-daily timer runs at random hours of the day

Status in apt package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Committed

Bug description:
  apt, from 1.2.10 onwards (ie any version in Xenial, onwards) uses a
  systemd timer instead of a cron.daily job. This is a good thing,
  decoupling apt daily runs from the rest of cron, and ensuring other
  cron.daily jobs are not blocked by up to half an hour by the default
  settings of unattended-upgrades.

  However the policy chosen is to have the apt daily script run at a
  random hour of the day in a wrong headed attempt to reduce server
  load. This has the side effect of running unattended-upgrades at
  random hours of the day — such as business hours — rather than being
  confined to between 6:25am and 6:55am, using the defaults.

  A better policy would be to have the script activate at 6:00am plus an
  interval of 20 minutes at one second intervals reducing the impact of
  timezone population spikes, while still allowing unattended-upgrades
  to run within a predictable interval, before 7am.

  At the very least, some sort of note in the NEWS file detailing the
  new behaviour would be welcome.

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