up2date, mirror repositories, and performance

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Feb 19, 2004, seth vidal <skvidal at phy.duke.edu> wrote:

> so if the metadata format we've worked on can become a standard for
> fedora core you could use the repomd.xml file as a way to check mirrors.
> It has timestamps and md5sums in it. The mirror master or some client
> could download this <1K file a set of mirrors compare it to the one on
> the mirror master and know (within a fair margin of error) which one's
> were in sync.

You know...  It would be *really* nice if the mirror master could do
it by itself, and issue redirects to mirrors known to be up to date,
instead of having up2date do it by itself.

The problem with `mirror' entries in up2date sources file is that it
tends to not save bandwidth when multiple boxes behind the same web
caching proxy are about to install the same set of updates (not an
unusual thing).  Due to the random selection of mirrors, each box ends
up downloading the update from a different mirror.

If the redirects came from the server, however, they'd (presumably) be
cached, and all clients would follow it and get a cache hit for the
downloads.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Happy GNU Year!                     oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
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