The reason why the installer is so small, it’s precisely that, it doesn’t contain anything from GSX, it’s just an installer, so at the end of the installation, you WILL get what’s the most current version, automatically.
What I’m guessing you are referring to with “a patch, then another patch”, which of course is done completely automatically, is the download is made into two steps:
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The bulk of the files will be downloaded first, as a set of several ZIP files, totalling about 3.6 GB, and these makes most of the size of GSX.
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After the main set of files, all subsequent updates released after those ZIP files will be downloaded as well.
This because the main set of files are not updated as often, and there’s a reason for that: if we released a new set of main files each time we released an update ( and we have been releasing updates weekly, on average ), it would be highly inefficient to post again 3.6GB of ZIP files, just because an handful of files in them changed. Since all files needs to propagate over the Cloudflare network, posting a fresh 3.6GB of data every week, whenever anything changes “just” so you won’t see the 2nd step being performed, would be a very bad use of the network, since it’s likely we might release a new update even before the whole network of 270 servers on Cloudflare caught with the last week release.
And, if we refreshed them every week, even when everything goes well, it means that in order to fill up the Cloudflare cache, users downloading the new file would connect directly to our server ( the first user from a specific local node that ask for a certain file that has been refreshed will download it from our server, the next user from the same node asking the same file will download it from Cloudflare ) and, considering the time it takes to spread the new files over 270 servers, if we refreshed them every week, it’s very likely that not many users would take advantage of the Cloudflare cache ( = downloading from your local node ) and, instead, they would mostly download from our servers, having to share our bandwidth with everybody else, instead of being spread across 270 different servers around the world.
And not just that, it will be very bad for YOU as well because, after those 3.6GB of main files are downloaded, you’ll be ASKED if you want to save them so, even if you want to completely uninstall GSX, you won’t have to download them again! They are saved here:
%APPDATA%\Virtuali\PackagesCache
This means, upon a complete removal, if you agreed to saving the files, you won’t have to redownload them again, at least not that main bulk of 3.6GB that, with a not-so-fast connection like yours, is a significant size.
And yes, we ask for it, because it must be your decision to decide to dedicate extra space on your disk, because only you can possibly know if it’s worth it against the effort just redownloading them all.
And yes, even if this might sound “FSDT-complex” ( the meme…), do you know what other apps do ? They JUST take your disk space without even asking, just check the size of this folder:
%PROGRAMDATA%\PackageCache
I guess it’s quite big, isn’t it ? It’s the stuff left by all the various installers that just placed it there, without even asking.
So yes, there are very good reasons why the download is made in two steps this way, and is to use network resources as efficiently as possible and as accessible as possible to everybody.