We’ve merged a change meant to address this issue: chore: shrink listing file to speed download times by willmurphyscode · Pull Request #347 · anchore/grype-db · GitHub
The upshot of this change is that the listing.json file is ~2% the size it was previously, but that grype db list will only show about 3 latest databases, instead of about 120 latest, for each schema version. The old databases are still available, they’re just no longer indexed in the default listing file. If you need to download old grype databases, for research for example, please let us know by posting here, sending us a message here, or opening an issue on GitHub.
We’ve also set up some DataDog synthetic metrics, so that we can measure whether this change helps. We’ll let this change bake for about a week before deciding whether this changed helped and was sufficient.
Separately, the DataDog synthetics are telling us that the default timeout for downloading the new database, 2 minutes, is definitely too low for some regions and networks, so I’ll raise that, probably to 5 minutes.