What is Qt MaintenanceTool Metadata and why is it taking so long to fetch?

Question

Every time I launch Qt MaintenanceTool to update or change components it takes minutes to fetch metadata, and may stuck from time to time depending on network and need to start again. What it is, and why does it take so long to fetch, and is there any way to skip this process because I may have run it just a few minutes ago?

I also use visual studio and the update process is easier and can always pick up where I left, is there any workaround for Qt? Thanks!

Answer 1

It is slow because it injects thousands of HTTP GET requests to download small metadata files (package information), thus chances for stuck. while it may be noticed with Windows installer due to large number of package repositories considering different versions of MinGW, Android ...etc. its less sever on Mac or Linux, there are ongoing discussions and lists following the issue, chained down this bug report Retrieving meta information from remote repository is too slow and happens too often it was suggested to improve performance but I am not aware that Qt took the suggested improvement (use a single HTTP/1.1 connection, or only a few of them, with Keep-Alive enabled, to do all the metadata GET requests, instead of opening a fresh socket for each GET) in this recent discussion Development To improve UX of the online installer.