time apt-get update: ... On mobile, this simply won't do (13.9MB network traffic, 11 sec user time on a dual-core core i5, 160K file IO requests... just to find out if there is something new - on a repository that is almost TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE smaller than what you can expect in mobile).
time apt-get update <snip> Fetched 271 kB in 7s (34.5 kB/s) real 0m12.073s user 0m2.812s sys 0m0.336s du -s -c /var/lib/apt /var/lib/dpkg/ 58392 /var/lib/apt 29084 /var/lib/dpkg/ 87476 total