packages.macports.org ping time

[Jeremy Lavergne]

>> Any US east coast devs: does the French mirror get used often for your archive downloads?
>> 
>> From Boston, MA lil.fr.packages.macports.org responds faster to pings than packages.macports.org. Since MacPorts uses ping time to calculate where to make its initial requests from, we might be sending people across the ocean when it isn't for any actual benefit.
> 
> how do you know it isn't for any actual benefit? (tcp likes less delay...)
> 
>> After spotting the french mirror being used, my initial check saw these times (ping, 5 samples each):
>> average lil.fr.macports.org response: 102.6ms
>> average packages.macports.org response: 123.8ms
> 
> 
> it would probably be worth comparing file transfer speeds from your location to the two mirrors when you're seeing different ping times like that...

Alrighty, from the numbers: the french mirror transferred data slower but responded to pings faster.

$ curl -o /dev/null http://packages.macports.org/qt4-mac/qt4-mac-4.7.3_0+quartz+universal.darwin_10.i386-x86_64.tbz2
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  201M  100  201M    0     0   802k      0  0:04:17  0:04:17 --:--:-- 1050k

$ curl -o /dev/null http://lil.fr.packages.macports.org/qt4-mac/qt4-mac-4.7.3_0+quartz+universal.darwin_10.i386-x86_64.tbz2
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  201M  100  201M    0     0   559k      0  0:06:09  0:06:09 --:--:--  560k