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
Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:
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?
Hi Deb,
I had tried Fedora 8 on my system and if I remember correctly, I had selected Taiwanese mirrors. However not only was the update slow, but the pre and post update process was slow too. Another thing I noticed was, the system on its own would start some background process and freeze all my controls till it would not get over. I suspect it was some updater because it came up once even when I inserted a CD in my drive. Anyway its out now and I am using Debian Etch. Without any bias IMHO deb based package management is much faster that rpm based ones as I have tried Mandriva too.
HiDebarshi,
You are right in pointing out the 2 Indian mirrors they are on the top in the mirrorlist.txt file. My mirror list is filled with 2 mentioned here indian mirrors and couple of china,taiwan and japan mirrors.
I have been using mirror.wbut.ac.in server always but lately, yum is not able to download even the filelists from these 2 Indian servers. The connection times out everytime and from other asian servers speed hovers around 15-20KB.
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.
My connection bandwidth is 512 and using MTNL Triband. Just recently problems started cropping up. It was never a problem earlier. I used to get healthy 54KBps from mirror.wbut.ac.in. Download speeds I get when downloading emacs from http://gnu.glug-nith.org/emacs/emacs-22.1.tar.gz is max 54KBps and from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/emacs-22.1.tar.gz is somewhere between 35-40KBps
Finally, I'm not 100% sure if its the servers problems or from my side. But, I haven't changed any settings or added or removed any yum plugins. The setup is as it was couple of months ago. Does yum require some more tinkering?
Thanks,
Prashant
My connection bandwidth is 512 and using MTNL Triband. Just recently problems started cropping up. It was never a problem earlier. I used to get healthy 54KBps from mirror.wbut.ac.in.
ftp://fedora.glug-nith.org/ was recently throttled to provide a maximum of 48KBps (or 384Kbps) to each client. However http://gnu.glug-nith.org remains unthrottled and can possibly provide a maximum of 1MBps (or 8Mbps). For further discussion regarding ftp://fedora.glug-nith.org/ you may please join glug-nith-admin@nongnu.org.
WBUT recently changed their mirror configuration, and it is now using FTP instead of HTTP. You can contact the WBUT admins by mailing to "Susmit" susmit.shannigrahi@gmail.com, "Indranil Das Gupta" indradg@gmail.com.
Since both allow a fixed number of clients to their Fedora mirrors, you might sometimes get: "Error 421: There are too many users... please try later". In that case Yum would move on to the next Asian mirror. If these Asian mirrors are too slow, you should notify the Fedora mirror managers.
Does yum require some more tinkering?
You can try using "metadata_expire=604800" in /etc/yum.conf to save some time spent in downloading the metadata every time.
Cheers, Debarshi
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Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray -
Prashant -
Rony