fetching sources from sourceforge takes very long time

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 10, 2011, at 16:14, Alexander Ulitin wrote:

> I need to install some ports(ex.tomcat6), that are dependent on a
> number of other ports (ex. junit,
> mx4j). Ping results in port -d for citylan.dl.sourceforge.net is the
> smallest - 20ms, so macports downloads sourcefile from that server and
> fetching takes a lot of time, speed is near 0, sometimes it is raised
> to 1000, but then it becomes 0 and I cant install apps from ports.
> 1.5MB archive is downloading for hours and if I try to download file
> using the browser from sourceforge it takes less than a second (stable
> 15mbit/s channel). And sometimes it works just fine (20 minutes of
> waiting 0% and then 20 ports are installed successfully within a
> minute and again waiting 0%(or other value ex. 58%) with sourceforge).
> 
> What's the reason of such behaviour of macports and sourceforge? How
> can I force it to work? I've tried to locally bind citylan.dl host to
> nonexistent address, but the problem repeats with other sourceforge
> server.

I do not know why you see low ping times to a server but then slow transfer speeds from it. That would be a question for your network administrator.

I am guessing that when you download from the SourceForge web site, you are not downloading from the same server. SourceForge has a network of dozens of content delivery servers across the globe, and has a redirector that directs you to one of them, presumably a "close" one, computed based on some algorithm. MacPorts has an algorithm too, but it's based on lowest ping times, which in your particular situation is not giving a good result.

In the case of SourceForge, I wonder: why are we even bothering maintaining a list of mirror servers, when SourceForge itself does so, through their redirector? Why don't we reduce the entire sourceforge fetch group down to its first item: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ ? This might not solve the general problem of servers with low ping times not necessarily having high transfer speed, but it might at least help for SourceForge, assuming their redirector has a better algorithm.