Scripsit Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > THis is not something that would bother anyone if it is a single user... but > if you have 10k users doing that, often close enough in time, well, things > should get MUCH worse as far as I can see. If they are doing this at random > times in the day, OTOH, it would not be that bad, I guess.
That's what I mean. People don't synchronize their updates - certainly I don't synchronize with anybody, and I don't know of any mechanism that I *could* use to sync with anybody if I wanted to. Assume a situation where mirror bandwidth is the limiting factor, and imagine a world with 3 mirrors. Say that during a certain time of the day 600 users each minute start to download updated x.org packages. Either they can do their download sequentially, choosing a random server; then their download will be finished in 15 minutes, and each server has a more-or-less constant 600/3*15 = 3000 connections active. Alternatively each user can spread his load over all three servers; his download now takes 5 minutes, and each server _still_ sees 600*5 = 3000 active connections at any time. Thus _all_ users get it faster by parallelizing. We get the same result if only some users parallelize - the mirrors do not see a diffence in load, the smart users get things faster, and the sequentially downloading users get it no slower than they would have otherwise. The calculation becomes more murky if there is backbone congestion which hits more than one mirror _and_ more than one end user. Then he who opens more connections at a time (whether to one server or several) will probably get an advantage at other users' expense. But I don't think that backbone congestion is such a universal condition that it should necessarily be the only scenario for making moral decisions about what apt should be _able_ to do. > Whether MY [a single individual] increased download speed is worth the extra > load on the mirror network, and whether it WOULD increase the load on the > mirror network is what we are asking here. Hm, you are not even asking whether the mirror load would go up? What _are_ you asking, then? > (and for the people who can't read whole threads, my position is that we > should never decrease the experience of a group of people to increase the > experience of an individual). I am questioning your assumption that doing parallel downloads will necessarily decrease the experience of a group of people at all. -- Henning Makholm "Vi skal nok ikke begynde at undervise hinanden i den store regnekunst her, men jeg vil foreslå, at vi fra Kulturministeriets side sørger for at fremsende tallene og også give en beskrivelse af, hvordan man læser tallene. Tak for i dag!" -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]