The download end-point of Spacewalk/SUSE Manager resolves the packages from channels dynamically with a database query.

With the integration of Salt into SUSE Manager we have the chance to rethink this.

As the current SUSE Manager Salt implementation uses a plain HTTP end-point and self-contained JWT tokens for authentication against the end-point, we think about resolving the channel/package relationship at repodata generation time (eg. symlinks) and then doing the authentication with a simple helper program so that we don't need to hit tomcat at all.

This would also make possible to use the endpoint without any authentication at all, giving even more performance.

Making the end-point static would make scalability much easier.

Results

The experiment failed and we were not able to implement a fully static end-point because of authentication. However, the project resulted in the addition of mod_xsendfile to avoid having the package download go via Tomcat.

• Benchmarks
• git branch is internal