I was wondering if there was something I can do to make OTA updates faster on a device that has assets. Without updating assets, my Photon 2 takes around 30 seconds to flash OTA, but with 5 32KB assets it is closer to 2.5 minutes. This seems like it's just due to booting in safe mode 5 times to flash each of the asset files when they change.
It's not really a big deal and I don't expect them to change often, but was wondering if I'm doing something wrong for it to be so slow. Or maybe if on Particle's end it can get combined into a single file or something before transfer so it only takes 1 extra boot instead of 5.
The reason it works that way is that assets only update if the name or hash changes. Each asset is tested individually, and does not depend on the firmware binary that it came from. So if they don't change frequently, they won't have to be updated often.
If we bundled all of the assets together you'd need to get all of them, even if only one of multiple assets changed. While data usage on the Photon 2 (Wi-Fi) doesn't matter as much, minimizing data usage is important for cellular.