We just added up the patch sets for August 2009 to 1.3GB. Holy cow that is a lot of content to be pushing out for patching. Little bit of looking and you'll discover that the main culprit is Visual Studio.

We've seen this before for SQL patches, but the size of the patches for Visual Studio are just stupidly huge. Just don't understand why we are deploying what looks like full installers just to fix a problem. For those of you struggling to manage the disk space on your DP's, be prepared to see over a GB disappear this month depending on what you push out.

I'd recommend splitting out the visual studio stuff as a seperate patch list\package and only assign it to DP's where it really is required and that have enough disk space. If you have ample disk space on your DP's throughout your hierarchy, consider yourself blessed!

Here is the August 2009 bulletin: http://www.microsoft.com/security/updates/bulletins/200908.aspx

And here is a good break down of each patch brought to you by Justin James over on TechRepublic: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/window-on-windows/?p=1414

Read the complete post at http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/r0b/archive/2009/08/12/microsoft-august-2009-patch-releases-huge-filesizes-this-month.aspx