This is more of a feature request than a bug report and I'm sure this must have come up in yum before but I can't find anything in bugzilla. Can I request yum downloads RPMs from its various sources in a multi threaded fashion? Today I performed a large yum update on my Fedora 12 laptop which pulled RPMS from four different sources. The first RPM to download was a large file using a slow connection and delayed the whole update by quite some time. If this had been parallelised with other downloads from other servers my update would have been far quicker.
Unlikely to be "threaded", but it is planned to do multiple downloads at once.
FEATURE CLARIFICATION/GOALS: If a total of 60 packages must be downloaded to satisfy a yum install/update request, and there are 10 repo servers reachable, iterate over the available servers, pulling one download from each simultaneously. In this example it should take one tenth the time assuming your client internet connection can keep up. For extra credit: When there are actually multiple IP addresses behind a repo server's publicly facing hostname (dns A records); pull multiple packages from the same "server" simultaneously; one per ip. For even more extra credit: 1) wait a couple seconds between starting each new simultaneous download. 2) Trend the aggregate inbound kbps of all transfers and only start new simultaneous downloads if the number is > 90% of what the last ten samples were (on average) This would maximally use the client's bandwidth, and server's bandwidth, without using any more transfer than would be used normally.
One problem with just going straight to "download 1 each from 10 of the mirror servers" is that Fedora has the notion of "private mirrors", but this info. isn't passed down to yum atm. So we'd have to be a bit more clever, or get more info. and use it. Otherwise, yes, we agree (and patches still accepted ;).
In the spirit of open source (I completely agree with James's comment about sending patches), I've had a look at the code. Seems there are several ways we could go about this with various levels of complexity and implementation time involved right up to Billy's approach above which sounds perfect but time consuming to implement (particularly for someone new to the code in terms of patch submission). Seems to me we could have an interim simpler solution where we could implement a configurable queue mechanism. For example, say we allow 3 downloads simultaneously, we could add a simple queueing mechanism to getPackage() in yumRepo.py. This would simply download up to 3 (configurable in yum.conf) packages at a time using the current mechanisms with little or no extra intelligence applied. If packages happen to come from the same server then download time would change very little, but if they did happen to be from different sources there's a good chance of being more efficient. This approach would certainly solve the case that lead to my raising this request i.e. where one slow server holds up the download of all the other packages. Of course, if lots of packages were being downloaded from the slow server then the approach I've put forward would still have drawbacks.
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