How many mirrors is too many

[Ryan Schmidt]

I was going to add a php fetch group to mirror_sites.tcl:

http://trac.macports.org/ticket/20654

In those places where the list of php mirrors is currently hardcoded  
(php4, php5, php5extension) there are only 8 mirrors. The full list  
on the PHP web site shows 114 mirrors in 65 countries. I tried adding  
all of those to the new fetch group, but in testing it out, MacPorts  
tried to start 114 simultaneous pings to test the response times of  
every server. Not only did over half of the pings fail to spawn, none  
of those that did were answered. I think the attempt didn't go over  
so well with my wireless router which didn't exactly crash but  
network traffic slowed to a crawl until I rebooted it.

I had wanted to have the php fetch group in mirror_sites.tcl updated  
automatically from the list on the PHP web site, and already wrote a  
script to do that. But now it looks like 114 is too many. How many  
could I reasonably have, and how should I narrow it down? Or should  
MacPorts base be updated to handle larger mirror groups more  
gracefully? Maybe it could pick a handful of servers at random and  
use the fastest of that subset, but the handful it picks at random  
might by chance be servers that are nowhere near you.

Looks like the biggest existing mirror groups are debian (26) and  
savannah (29) to which you'd add the global MacPorts mirrors.


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