Performance Impact of a Large Solaris 11 IPS Repo

The content and size of a Solaris IPS Repo has impact on your update processes.
Of course more SRUs increase the size of the repository and the duration of package downloads and operations.

To compare the difference we have two repos on a SPARC S7 LDom.

A first one with 60 updates: all U4 SRUs and a few U3 SRUs

-bash-5.0$ ipsadm -c show_repo repository=http://192.168.20.75:8282 | grep entire@ | wc -l
60

The second repo only with U4 GA and latest SRU38

-bash-5.0$ ipsadm -c show_repo repository=http://192.168.20.75:8283 | grep entire@ | wc -l
2

When replacing the publisher on a target server the catalog is downloaded and analyzed.
Look at this huge difference

# time pkg set-publisher -G "*" -g http://192.168.20.75:8282 solaris

real 4m23.097s

user 4m9.363s
sys 0m12.151s

# time pkg set-publisher -G "*" -g http://192.168.20.75:8283 solaris

real 0m37.629s
user 0m34.968s

sys 0m2.287s

On a SPARC S7 LDom with 3 zones a pkg update -n (trial run) takes nearly
9 minutes with the large IPS Repo.

# time pkg update -n -C 5 --be-name u4.sru38 entire@11.4,5.11-11.4.38.0.1.101.6
...
Planning linked: 3/3 done

real 8m46.280s

user 19m25.699s
sys 0m38.675s

With the smaller repo less than 6 minutes.

Planning linked: 3/3 done

real 5m59.820s
user 12m59.500s

sys 0m27.611s

Summary
Re-create your IPS repo from time to time after updates when you for sure don't need older SRUs anymore.
But always add the GA version first, and then the required SRUs additionally.