slow mirror workaround?

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Felix Miata <mrmazda at earthlink.net> wrote:
> This time Ctrl-C and immediate repeat worked a charm. Is it a normally OK
> thing to do? Isn't there some way to configure Yum to see when ETA on a
> package is and stays beyond reasonable length to try some other mirror?

In yum.conf, you can set "minrate" to a bandwidth in bytes per second,
and then set "timeout" to a time in seconds.  If the download speed of
a package falls below the bandwidth set in "minrate" for a period
longer than the time set in "timeout", yum aborts the download and
tries another mirror.  For more information about these options, see
`man yum.conf`.

The default setting is geared toward only dropping connections that
are basically totally screwed.  The yum developers can't know what
kind of connection you have in advance, and setting it too high will
result in yum never working for those unfortunate souls with terrible
bandwidth.  It's basically a choice between slow mirrors aggravating
people with fast connections or yum just flat out not working with
slow connections.  I understand why they went with the latter.  :-)

FWIW, dnf seems to have different logic for this that seems to work
better in my limited experience, so you might also want to try that.
(This also means that this problem will go away for everyone in a
future Fedora release.  :-)

-T.C.