I'm using Fedora 8. Nowadays yum is updating at extremely slow speeds from Asian mirrors.
I am assuming that your Yum is configured to fetch mirrorlists from the following URLs: http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-8&arch=x86_64 http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-f8&arc...
Now do you know which particular mirror you are using and finding it slow?
Most of the time, the first two mirrors would be an Indian one. One of the Indian mirrors -- ftp://fedora.glug-nith.org/ -- allows only a limited number of anonymous clients to connect, and each client is allowed a maximum of 32KBps to 48KBps of bandwidth.
The other Indian mirror -- http://mirror.wbut.ac.in/pub/fedora -- is also planning to do something similar, and they might be changing their configuration as I am writing this email.
In case you are having problems with the Indian mirrors:
Now both these mirrors are quite new, experience very heavy loads -- http://glug-nith.org/usage ; http://mirror.wbut.ac.in/awstats/awstats.pl -- and face the standard bandwidth shortage prevalent in India. The first one has an 8Mbps line, while the second has a 5Mbps line, which they are planning to increase.
Even then, it has been my observation that apart from the heavily loaded Fedora mirror, the other mirrors which these two machines host are quite fast. eg., try downloading Emacs from http://gnu.glug-nith.org/emacs/emacs-22.1.tar.gz and ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/emacs-22.1.tar.gz and compare the speeds.
So if we had some specific inputs from you as to which mirror(s) you find slower, what sort of bandwidth you have, etc. we can try to optimize the Indian Fedora mirrors accordingly.
If the problem is with the other Asian mirrors, then you might take it up on Fedora's mirror mailing lists.
mirrorlist.txt is filled with asian servers only. Is there any way that yum downloads Non Asian mirrors list from US or Europe? or on what basis does yum downloads country specific mirror lists. Is there any way to change the defaults?
There is a way. You need to pass a country variable tothe mirrorlist URLs. Eg., for only Indian mirrors you would do: http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-8&arch=x86_64&am... http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-f8&arc...
Cheers, Debarshi