Bugzilla – Bug 284617
Enhance registration to allow selecting the fastest mirror from list of online update sources
Last modified: 2008-10-02 17:57:56 UTC
yast update is slow, picks slow sites, and doesn't let you select and choose fast mirrors to update from. If you run the update configuration option, it replaces the old mirror, doesn't tell you what the new mirror is - which could be randomly worse than the old one AND it takes AGEs to do it. Given the amount of time it takes, I would have thought that it would at least figure out a decent mirror. The packaging and update system in suse 10.2 is a LOT worse than 10.0 or even 9.1. It's not just me who thinks that. Things have got a lot slower for very little benefit if any. The yast source selection stuff is also VERY slow. Even dealing with Windows Update is a more "pleasant" experience than dealing with suse 10.2 update, and its update configuration.
you can change the mirror to one of your own choice in the YAST "Installation Sources" dialog.
While that's true: In previous versions of suse a _list_ of mirrors AND their corresponding URLs were given for people to select from. We didn't have to try to figure out what was the correct URL. Now all that has been removed and it's still SLOWER! What is the update software doing? The current options appear to be: a) Let 10.2 pick a site for you = so far 3/4 sites autopicked are slow + it takes a long time to even add the site. b) Try to find out what is a fast site AND figure out the correct URL (I believe the path can differ from site to site) that will work with the 10.2 update = tedious + annoying + takes time. The rest of suse 10.2 is OK/nice, but the software + package management stuff seems to have become less usable.
(In reply to comment #0 from Lincoln Yeoh) > The packaging and update system in suse 10.2 is a LOT worse than 10.0 or even > 9.1. It's not just me who thinks that. You might have also wanted to tell, that 10.2 is much faster than 10.1. Anyway, the problem of slow mirrors is partly true. > Things have got a lot slower for very little benefit if any. The yast source > selection stuff is also VERY slow. That's, of course, a matter of taste :) --- --- --- Anyway, the 'low speed of mirror' can be sometimes cause by the huge amount of data you need to download - this should be fixed in a new libzypp in 10.3. I'd see a very good enhancement for 'registration' by requesting more online_sources and then by checking which one is the fastest. Reassigning to jdsn since he's the maintainer of registration online update sources. Changing summary to: Enhance registration to allow selecting the fastest mirror from list of online update sources
As soon as the registration gets rewritten, it is able to request multiple mirrors from the registration server. The user might select one of them. The rewrite was postponed - so this will not be changed for 10.3
(In reply to comment #3 from Lukas Ocilka) > (In reply to comment #0 from Lincoln Yeoh) > > The packaging and update system in suse 10.2 is a LOT worse than 10.0 or even > > 9.1. It's not just me who thinks that. > > You might have also wanted to tell, that 10.2 is much faster than 10.1. Sorry, "10.2 is faster than 10.1" doesn't make it faster than 10.0! Why can't we move back to the update mechanism used in 10.0? What was wrong in that? > > Things have got a lot slower for very little benefit if any. The yast source > > selection stuff is also VERY slow. > > That's, of course, a matter of taste :) Sorry, can't agree with that! Even with a fast network Yast started doing weird sluggish moves, which often fail, and also the "Abort" button is only a decoration nowadays - don't you think it reminds M$ more and more with time? > Anyway, the 'low speed of mirror' can be sometimes cause by the huge amount of > data you need to download - this should be fixed in a new libzypp in 10.3. This isn't true either. The network is very often idling, so does CPU, and yast doing hell knows what... Would be good to have it fixed for 10.3, though...
The default update repository is a redirector. It redirects your requests to the best/nearest/fastest mirror in your region. The registration mechanism will only return this one single redirector url. And since 11.0 the update source will be included by default. If you want to change all this, because you know of a better mirror, you can always do this in the "Software Repositories" module. I'll close it as WORKSFORME.
What we really need is a client-side way of setting a preferred mirror. Not replacing the universal download.opensuse.org entry point with another one - rather indicating that a particular mirror should be preferred (if it has the requested file). http://en.opensuse.org/Libzypp/Failover encompasses this.
I'm still meditating whether to reopen this bug. Anyway, short heads-up on the status quo: We have an new, alternative, experimental media handler in libzypp which allows accessing multiple mirrors in parallel and do automatical failover. There are some interesting things that can be done with that. Unfortunately, it is difficult to play with libzypp since it needs recompilations for each change, but we could have a wrapper that's called by libzypp, which could change the downloaded metalink on the fly and add mirrors to it. The wrapper would then call the actual download program. This is a way how setting preferred mirrors can achieved today. It also allows to add a local mirror to the list that isn't publicly reachable. That should give all the flexibility that is needed. In the end, zypper and yast should have an interface to do such configuration of course.
Open a new one :) ;)
:) Well, the problem is a long-standing one, and known, and I have been working on it since some time now... This should eventually turn into a feature request once all prerequisites are in place. The issue won't get lost. Therefore the short heads-up; I didn't want to leave this bug uncommented either. :)