On 12 March 2010 16:42, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 14:21 +0000, Fred Williams wrote:
> On 12 March 2010 14:08, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan@xxxxxxxxx>
> 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.
>
> I tried renewing the mirror cache. No difference (ping times
> tend not to
> vary much).
>
> I then manually edited the /var/cache/yum/timedhosts.txt file
> to bias
> the results against the mirror yum was choosing (I made it
> worst rather
> than best). Oddly, it again made no difference! It seems
> there's a
> cunning hidden cache of these results that I don't know about.
> Finally I
> disabled the plugin completely and got decent b/w without it.
>
> Perhaps we should be considering some kind of BitTorrent
> version of the
> repos in which the mirrors are seeds and the users are
> leeches, though I
> realize that this is harder than it looks, particularly when
> taking into
> account the synching of the mirrors themselves.
>
> poc
>
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>
> Perhaps not so difficult - though I've never used them myself, I
> recall that in the Debian, if not Ubuntu (Sometimes hard to tell)
> repositories are some packages that allow for bittorrent fetching of
> deb packages - perhaps if they're still relevent and working, they
> could be used as a base to create a means of implementing the same,
> maybe as a plugin for Yum or similar.
> Theoretically, I think the only main differences are the download
> protocol. HTTP/FTP or BitTorrent. Once downloaded the package can
> still be used in the same way, there's no difference there.
> The main downside I see to it is that those users on an ISP which
> throttles BitTorrent will suffer, and have to go back to standard
> downloads, but if both are provided, then no issue. Or at least very
> little.
> Just my 2p. Or 2c, depending on your currency.
Interesting. I'll see what I can can find on BT use in the Debian/Ubuntu
world.
poc
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A quick search for 'deb' on the Debian Package database returned a lot of results but the specific one that matches would be this one, I believe: http://packages.debian.org/lenny/debtorrent
At a glance, it's hard to say how useful it'll be, even as an example to work from.
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