That's an abomination What next, QEMU in JS ? :P ... to revisit one tidbit tho: time apt-get update: ... Fetched 13.9 MB in 49s (281 kB/s) Reading package lists... Done Command being timed: "apt-get update" User time (seconds): 11.10 System time (seconds): 0.50 Percent of CPU this job got: 23% Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 0:49.54 Average shared text size (kbytes): 0 Average unshared data size (kbytes): 0 Average stack size (kbytes): 0 Average total size (kbytes): 0 Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 15808 Average resident set size (kbytes): 0 Major (requiring I/O) page faults: 0 Minor (reclaiming a frame) page faults: 30862 Voluntary context switches: 13521 Involuntary context switches: 2412 Swaps: 0 File system inputs: 0 File system outputs: 159096 Socket messages sent: 0 Socket messages received: 0 Signals delivered: 0 Page size (bytes): 4096 Exit status: 0 attila@t410:~$ du -s -c /var/lib/apt /var/lib/dpkg/ 83728 /var/lib/apt 68468 /var/lib/dpkg/ 152196 total 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).