Ubuntu – Do I really need apt-daily.service and apt-daily-upgrade.service

aptboot

The startup with 18.04 seems to take a bit longer than 17.10 so I ran systemd-analyze blame and found that apt-daily.service and apt-daily-upgrade.service are taking up over three minutes between them.

:~$ systemd-analyze time
    Startup finished in 9.173s (kernel) + 3min 30.201s (userspace) = 3min 39.375s
    graphical.target reached after 15.268s in userspace
:~$ systemd-analyze blame
    1min 52.265s apt-daily-upgrade.service
    1min 27.579s apt-daily.service
          6.603s NetworkManager-wait-online.service
          5.105s plymouth-quit-wait.service
          1.517s plymouth-start.service
          1.439s dev-sda1.device.............

So, what are these services actually doing (checking apt is up to date I imagine), why do they take so long and do I really need them to run on every bootup?

Best Answer

You can decide it by yourself. But on my systems (mainly 16.04 LTS) I have disabled both with:

sudo systemctl disable apt-daily.service
sudo systemctl disable apt-daily.timer

sudo systemctl disable apt-daily-upgrade.timer
sudo systemctl disable apt-daily-upgrade.service

Because of the fact that some functionality on desktop is provided by update-manager and
I do not want to get error messages about lock-files in archives or lists directories whenever I run apt manually.

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