Comments on the fastestmirror plugin

[Fred Williams]

On 12 March 2010 16:42, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 14:21 +0000, Fred Williams wrote:
> > On 12 March 2010 14:08, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com>
> > 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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