Software Distributor Administration Guide HP-UX 11i v1, 11i v2, and 11i v3 (5900-2561, March 2013)

When the reinstall_files option is false, the user can also control which attributes are
checked in order to determine if the fileset is already installed or available. If the
reinstall_files_use_cksum option is set to true, the size, mtime, and cksum attributes are
checked.
If the reinstall_files_use_cksum option is false, then only the size and mtime are checked.
Checking the checksum attribute is more time consuming but more reliable. The size and mtime
checks are very fast.
The user can see which files were actually installed or copied and which were skipped due to
being already up to date by setting the loglevel option to 2.
8.7 Database Checkpointing
The tools perform automatic checkpointing, recording transactions in the SD-UX depot catalog, or
Installed Products Database (IPD) at the fileset level. Additionally, checkpointing at the file level is
supported through attributes stored with the file.
During a swinstall or swcopy operation, all filesets in the current product being loaded are
recorded in the depot catalog or IPD as having a state of transient. After all filesets in a product
complete the copy or install, the state is changed to available or installed, and the next product is
started. At this point, retrying an operation will not attempt to recopy or reinstall the filesets that
are already installed (see “Retry Command” (page 139)).
NOTE: This behavior requires that either the product or fileset have a revision defined.
The current state and revisions of filesets can be displayed with the command:
swlist [-d] -l fileset -a revision -a state
If there is an error installing a fileset in the product that causes the install to fail (e.g., lost connection
to the source), all filesets in the product are changed from transient to corrupt. (All filesets are
assumed corrupt since the product level postinstall script has not been run yet. In actuality, the
filesets may be properly installed.)
Independent of a fileset being installed (either properly or in a corrupt state) you can determine
whether any particular file is installed properly with a high degree of certainty through the file’s
size, mtime, and cksum attributes. Through these file attributes, checkpointing at the file level is
approximated (this is described in the previous section).
8.8 Compression
The swinstall and swcopy commands can transfer large amounts of data over the network
from depots to targets. The SD-UX compress_files option can improve performance by first
compressing files that are to be transferred. This can reduce network usage by approximately 50%;
the exact amount of compression depends on the type of files. Binary files compress less than 50%;
text files generally compress more.
Set this option to true only when network bandwidth is clearly restricting total throughput. If it is
not clear that this option will help, compare the throughput of a few swinstall or swcopy tasks
(i.e., with and without compression) before changing this option value.
You can use swcopy to compress files and leave them compressed in a target depot or compress
before network transfer and uncompress afterward.
Precompressing a depot is advantageous when installing or copying to multiple targets. If the
source depot is not already compressed, then each file is recompressed for each target.
You can set uncompress_files to true to leave a depot uncompressed after copying with
swcopy. For swinstall, the compress_files option will compress all uncompressed files
before network transfer. Files are always uncompressed before installing them to the target file
system.
140 Reliability and Performance