I have a good *fast* Internet connection however yum too often decides to download updates from intolerably slow mirrors - and sometimes yum even chooses to fetch the data from the server which give 1Kbyte/sec speed. So, these are the major bugs in yum: 1) It doesn't remember mirrors with good speed 2) It doesn't show all available mirrors before downloading updates 3) It doesn't allow to choose the mirrors to download from 4) It doesn't show a mirror from which a current file is being fetched from 5) It doesn't have a key combination to easily switch mirrors while getting the current file (Ctrl+C it really inefficient and slow - and the end result is not defined - it may just decide to stop fetching updates at all)
You can install yum-fastestmirror ... having this be dynamic is on the TODO list, but is certainly not near the top. If you have a fast connection and good bandwidth, you might want to use reposync at night and register that with MirrorManager.
Just to clarify, it seems that the use of yum-fastestmirror takes care of 1 and 4 directly. If it automatically picks a mirror it thinks is fast, it seems to me there is no need for 2 or 3. So is the only remaining request to do 5 automatically instead of manually? (If a file is being downloaded slowly, try to see if another mirror is faster?) If this would be an enhancement to yum-fastestmirror, should this bug be reassigned to yum-utils, since it is part of that source package?
fastestmirror can't do it dynamically ... to do that we'd need to move it into core. fastestmirror basically tests the mirrors at bootup, and then sorts them based on that info.
*** Bug 450875 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Created attachment 340988 [details] Implements a slightly less naive approach to mirror speed I'm attaching a simple patch that implements a slightly less naive approach to determining the speed of a mirror. It basically just times how long it takes to download the repomd.xml file (the current behavior just checks how long it takes to connect a socket). It's still not perfect, but it's an improvement.
I've tried the patch on a Fedora 10 system, and then on several CentOS 5.3 systems (both i386 and x86_64), and it seems to work like a charm! Finding the fastest mirrors is a bit slower than before, but still acceptably fast. And the results are much better: closer (or at least more well connected) mirrors seem to consistently come up at the top of the list now. My test method: 1) yum clean all 2) yum check-update 3) sort -k2n /var/cache/yum/timedhosts.txt 4) (repeat until satisfied) Before the patch was applied, results (in the timedhosts.txt file) varied from run to run, with distant, slower sites often winning out against local mirrors. With the patch, I get much more consistent results. When the sort order is different, it's usually just a few sites with fairly similar timing getting flipped around. Well done!
Thanks a lot for this patch, but it only solves the first outlined problem. Should I report four new bug reports? ;)
Has anyone merged the patch I attached? It's a pretty simple change, and it seems to work well. Is there any chance of getting this merged soon? Thanks.
We've looked at it, and known we could do that ... but it has problems: 1. urllib isn't thread safe, so you can't do it this way (neither is curl, which is what yum/urlgrabber in F12+ uses). 2. You are now downloading a _lot_ of data, Fedora 11 updates has at least 46 http urls ... that's over 200k. And you are ignoring a lot of config. data from yum (throttling, etc.) 3. It's still unreliable. 4. It still doesn't work with proxies. 5. Mirror manager is very good on it's own, in my experience (there's a reason fastestmirror isn't in the default install). And RHEL doesn't use mirrors.
moving this to yum, as if/when we do this it's almost certainly going to be in yum core.
James, thanks for all of the information. This is great to know.
> 5. Mirror manager is very good on it's own, in my experience (there's a reason > fastestmirror isn't in the default install). And RHEL doesn't use mirrors. My experience is entirely the opposite - at work it appears to consistently pick a pretty bad mirror. With plain yum the mirror picked gives me 25 KB/s, once I install yum-plugin-fastestmirror, it picks a mirror giving 1 MB/s download. This gives people a really bad impression of yum by default. I would really like to see the fastestmirror plugin logic (or equivalent) included in YUM by default. Are there anything preventing us having the fastestmirror plugin included by default in base yum in Fedora ?
yum and related packages are no longer actively developed. They are being replaced with dnf, dnf-utils, etc. I'm closing this bug because it's most likely never going to be fixed. If you still consider your bug report important, reopen it, please.