Allow pause of filter automatic updates when network is metered

[DeepChirp]

Allow pause of filter automatic updates when network is metered to avoid additional traffic costs.

[gwarser]

Chromium experimental API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInformation/saveData

[gorhill]

Couldn't this lead to cases of filter lists never being updated?

[gwarser]

Probably will. To be clear - I'm against. I doubt ads and tracking will pause on metered/slow connections. I thought it's not possible to detect connection type (no API), but I was wrong.

[gorhill]

Yeah probably first step would be to make the case that auto-downloading filter lists is causing undue brandwidth usage. I am skeptical of this given most lists update every few days, and the encoding is gzip during transfert.

[gorhill]

Here are some numbers which cover the lists served by uBO itself, so this exclude Online Malicious URL Blocklist and Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list (which I small relative to other main lists).

The figures are derived from jsDelivr stats:

• https://www.jsdelivr.com/package/gh/gorhill/uBlock?tab=stats
• https://www.jsdelivr.com/package/gh/uBlockOrigin/uAssetsCDN?tab=stats

Question is: how much bandwidth per user per month is attributable to uBO's auto-update of filter lists.

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First: how many users of uBO out there?

Answer: this says that assets.json is currently downloaded 48,317,831 per month. Given that:

• assets.json is set to update every 13 days
• jsDelivr is just one of 4 CDNs being used

Thus: requests-per-month / (days in a month / 13-day update period) x 4 CDNs = 48,317,831 / (30 / 13) x 4 = 83,750,907 users.

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Second: How much bandwidth per month is consumed by all those users?

Answer: this says that bandwidth consumed in the last month is 96 TB.

Thus: per-month bandwidth x 4 CDNs = 96 TB x 4 = 384 TB = 384,000,000,000,000 per month.

Answer to "how much bandwidth per user per month is attributable to uBO's auto-update of filter lists":

384,000,000,000,000 / 83,750,907 = 4,585,024 per month = 4.6 MB per month = 153 KB per day on average.

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Using the same method for assets.json (which is pulled from a different repo (so separate jsDelivr stats page), we get 472 bytes per day on average.

Thus let's say 153 KB + 472 bytes = 154 KB per day.

Probably need to add a few KB to account urlhaus-1/plowe-0 -- these lists are rather small compared to the rest, so I will assume the above figure is close enough to reality.

Of course, those who enabled more filter lists will require more bandwidth, the above numbers give a ballpark idea of bandwidth usage by uBO for default lists.

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Conclusion: At an average of 154 KB per day, I don't see the need of a auto-pause auto-update feature as being of interest at this point, especially given that the bad side-effect is some installations potentially running with seriously out of date lists, and given this would just require to add more code which I rather not create/maintain unless really needed.

[krystian3w]

Maybe possible is force brotli instead gzip for compatible servers?

https://caniuse.com/brotli:

Firefox 44+ (legacy XP, Vista too)
Chrome 51+
Edge 79+
Opera 38+

[gwarser]

Brotli is already used.

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br:
cdn.statically.io
ublockorigin.pages.dev
cdn.jsdelivr.net
easylist.to
secure.fanboy.co.nz

gzip:
github.io
filters.adtidy.org
raw.githubusercontent.com
get.letsblock.it

plain text
pgl.yoyo.org