On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 16:52 -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote: > 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. > > > And there you have the heart of the problem, the evaluation is not remotely > correct for most cases. It would be worth adding code to download some small RPM > from a number of sites and measure b/w for something real. However, disabling > the feature works, too. Sadly, downloading a "small" RPM is unlikely to give very reliable results either. Due to TCP slow-start, a stable effective b/w may only be reached after some 10's of kb have been downloaded. This is not an easy problem to solve. poc -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
