[caribousoup]

I wonder how many real word resources are wasted over this. It costs money to serve that data, it costs money to download that data, it congests the network wherever that data is being routed, it consumes energy however that is generated in the region.

Windows Update does this too, if the transfer fails it starts from zero. Multiply this by... what, a couple million times for each update?

I assume they run the numbers and it's cheaper to just dump all the data and run things inefficiently, compared to having teams deploy it correctly. It's just a waste though, and it pisses off your customers.

[vadarvariu]

My personal monthly usage is in the 100G region; this particular failed update has cost me 20G of burned bandwidth. Where I live around 2% of the country doesn't have access to decent broadband. Since these updates are released every 2 months or so in a very back-of-the-envelope fashion failed updates amount to 0.2% of the country's total bandwidth usage. I might be an order of magnitude off but that is still an incredible waste.

Maybe they did run the numbers, but the amount of engineering effort required to fix it is absolutely minimal (couple of lines...). A significantly worse outcome for society as a whole at the cost of a try-catch block.