PENDING Extremely large deployment package for updates

[Ken L.]

I normally use a new deployment package each year for all the patches that are processed by ADR rules. I noticed that the current 2025 package is currently over 328GB in size, just up through May! When I try to look in the package to see what's taking up so much room, the "Content Size (KB)" field is blank for all the patches. How can I find out what updates are taking up so much room in the deployment package? My remote DP's don't have enough drive space to hold that big of a deployment package and previous years have never taken up this much space. I really need to figure out how to trim it down. Any help is appreciated!

Ken

 

[Prajwal Desai]

A few things to clarify here: Do you create a new deployment package each time the ADR runs, or do you maintain a single package for deployment? Additionally, the deployment package size seems excessively large. I suspect it might include updates spanning from January 2025 to May 2025, or possibly even from the previous year.

Coming to your question on the getting the size of individual updates within the deployment package, I will see if there is a way to do that in my ConfigMgr lab and get back to on this.

 

[Ken L.]

A few things to clarify here: Do you create a new deployment package each time the ADR runs, or do you maintain a single package for deployment? Additionally, the deployment package size seems excessively large. I suspect it might include updates spanning from January 2025 to May 2025, or possibly even from the previous year.

Coming to your question on the getting the size of individual updates within the deployment package, I will see if there is a way to do that in my ConfigMgr lab and get back to on this.

Thank you!

And I have the ADR rule set up to always use the same deployment package and then every December, after the last run of the ADR, I create a new Deployment package for the next year and update the ADR rule. That's always worked in the past, although I see the 2024 patch deployment package started getting pretty big by the end of the year too, but not as bad as 2025 has gotten. Would it be better practice to use a new deployment package every month? Here's what I see for my MS Patches deployment packages:

 

[Prajwal Desai]

I usually configure ADR to generate a new deployment package, as it simplifies troubleshooting. However, in your case, the deployment packages are quite large, and I wonder how much space these packages might occupy on your primary site server.

 

[Ken L.]

Have you come up with a way to see the size of the updates within the deployment package? I'm just thinking visibility into what's adding all the space may help me understand what's happening a little better.

Thank you for your help!

 

[Ken L.]

I have an update on this. I've been digging deeper and between using space sniffer on the directory structure with the deployment package and cross referencing the files I'm finding, it appears that the monthly OS patches are starting to take up anywhere from 10-15GB apiece. On top of that, I have a very difficult environment to tame, which means I have cumulative patches each month for Windows 10 (multiple versions), Windows 11 (21H2-24H2), plus servers 2016, 2019, 2022, and now 2025. We just started using Windows 11 last Fall and 2025 at the first of the year, so I suspect that explains the rapid growth from what we used to have. I still wish the "Content Size" field in SCCM worked - that would have made this a lot easier to track down.

Thank you for looking into this for me. If you have any thoughts on how to help whittle things down other than getting rid of all the older junk in the environment (which would be ideal), I'd love to hear them, but otherwise thanks again for your help.

 

[Prajwal Desai]

Have you come up with a way to see the size of the updates within the deployment package? I'm just thinking visibility into what's adding all the space may help me understand what's happening a little better.

Thank you for your help!

Ok, I had deployed the updates via ADR and was waiting for the deployment to complete. From what I see, there is no direct way to see the size of individual updates within a deployment package. I also tried adding the content size column, but that doesn't show any data.

 

[Prajwal Desai]

@Ken L. - Here is something that I tried in my lab. Since there is no easy way to get the individual updates downloaded by ADR, i thought of using the golden tool - TreeSize to see if that shows the size. Yes, it does, and you can see the size of each update package.