On 04/04/11 00:00, Brendan Long wrote:
On 03/28/2011 03:43 AM, Cédric Girard wrote:
On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Oon-Ee Ng<ngoonee.talk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If you have 10 files to download, powerpill allows for 1 file from
mirror A, another from mirror B, and chunks of that large 68MB file
from mirrors C, D, and E at the same time.
With the other solutions, you'd still wait for file 1 to finish
downloading before downloading file 2.
I understand this as being more flexible. But bandwith-wise, I do not see
why the Powerpill solution is more efficient.
Or maybe this come useful only when downloading small files where file
content transfert itself is negligible compared to connection opening and
other protocol handling...
For me the benefit came in two parts:
* When you download a bunch of small files, most of your "download
time" is actually just starting connections. Powerpill starts a
bunch of connections at once so you can actually use your bandwidth.
* A lot of Arch's mirrors are really slow. Powerpill lets you not
worry about the speed of individual mirrors, because it's only
their combined speed that matters.
I found both of these are heavily mirror-dependent (and occasionally a
given mirror changes to be worse or better than it used to be). It's
dramatic enough that it feels like "some have problems, and some don't".
I've got a good mirrorlist currently... check
https://www.archlinux.de/?page=MirrorStatus , and I think there was a
command-line tool... also the kernel.org one likely works well
everywhere (?) so if overwhelmed by the options could check if that
changes anything - http://mirrors.kernel.org/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
-Isaac
