slow distfiles mirror

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 8, 2016, at 12:49 PM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:

> Ryan said: "it's possible for a server to respond quickly to pings but slowly to actual file transfers"
> 
> I'm interested in what prompted that.

I just imagine that on some networks, it might be possible that the small amount of data used for pings could transfer quickly, while nevertheless that the larger amount of data used to actually transfer files might be slower. I thought this was something that had happened to me on some network at some point in the past.

It's also possible that all pings failed, in which case MacPorts does not know which server is best. In that case, I'm not sure whether MacPorts tries servers in the order listed in the tcl file or alphabetical order or what.

In any case I'm not an expert on network infrastructure. I just know that our mirrors usually work fine, so when a user reports a problem with one of them, it's usually because of something on the user's system like a virus scanner or firewall, or something on the user's network, or some problem with the user's ISP, or a problem somewhere between the user's ISP and the network the mirror is on.