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 -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
