In reply to Miroslav Glavic.

When we added automatic background updates in 3.7 we turned it on by default for minor and security releases only. With this we added the ability to do in-branch updates, which means we can still keep outdated installs (those on 3.7.x or 3.8.x) secure. It's worth it, even though it means extra packages.

Yes, updates produce a lot of extra load on WordPress.org, but we can handle it fine. While installs by default check every 12 hours, we do have the ability to temporarily instruct sites to check more frequently. We just haven't used it yet. We've been making numerous hardware and infrastructure upgrades to enable us to shrink the window from 12 hours to an hour or less. This was the first release with new 10 GBit NIC cards on the load balancers, for example. With each release we learn where we need to make adjustments in the future. I suspect we'll be able to try a much shorter window with the next release, whenever that may be.