Re: Comments on the fastestmirror plugin

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On 03/12/2010 01:57 PM, Robert Nichols wrote:
> On 03/12/2010 08:08 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>> The yum fastestmirror plugin (yum-plugin-fastestmirror) claims to
>> evaluate the speed of a bunch of repo mirrors and use the fastest one
>> relative to the user's location.
>>
>> However AFAIK what it *actually* does is make a test connection to the
>> to the candidate mirrors and order them according to response time,
>> which in many cases is dominated by network latency, which can distort
>> the results. For well-connected user machines in first-world countries
>> it probably doesn't matter much, and may have the beneficial effect of
>> spreading the load over a wider range of mirrors, but for those of us in
>> a less privileged position it can matter a lot. Ironically, these are
>> the cases where such an optimization could do the most good.
>>
>> A case in point: I live in Venezuela and on several recent occasions yum
>> decided that my closest repo was in Puerto Rico, which as the packet
>> flies is probably true. However the b/w I got as a result was around 2
>> or 3kbps.
> 
> If there are particular hosts or domains you want to avoid, you can edit
> /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf and add an "exclude" line.
> There is a commented-out sample exclude line at the bottom of that file:
> 
>           #exclude=.gov, facebook

Is it guaranteed that the site listed at the beginning is being used for
*all* downloads from the particular repo mirror?

It wasn't clear (to me) if that site was being used for everything from
that mirror, or if different mirrors were being chosen during the actual
file downloads to help spread out the load....

I've seen some bizarre behavior at times where yum seems to switch
mirrors.  Particularly when a file cannot be found or a repo is not
up-to-date.  It makes me wonder that the site printed out at the
beginning isn't necessarily the site being used for RPM downloads, so I
was wondering how I could tell which mirror a particular download was
being done from!

Can someone please elaborate on the exact behavior of how yum uses the
various mirrors for meta-files and RPMs to download (or even
delta-RPMs).  Thanks.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome@xxxxxxx
cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)
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