Mirrors are painfully slow

god · 2019-03-22 11:08:50

I'm installing arch on an old computer and it is taking forever. Downloads speeds from mirrors are around 15k/s.

I'm using a 300Mb/s ethernet connection so it should be way faster.

Is this normal? Are there other mirrors that are faster?

levi · 2019-03-22 23:16:14

I just did a quick update and it maxed out my internet connection, pretty much. My top scored repo is currently https://archlinux32.agoctrl.org/ in france, which might be more or less useful to you depending on your exact location. I use rankmirrors to sort my repos by speed before installation.

deep42thought · 2019-03-23 06:43:24

god: which mirror do you use?

god · 2019-03-24 10:08:50

levi wrote:

I just did a quick update and it maxed out my internet connection, pretty much. My top scored repo is currently https://archlinux32.agoctrl.org/ in france, which might be more or less useful to you depending on your exact location. I use rankmirrors to sort my repos by speed before installation.

deep42thought wrote:

god: which mirror do you use?

Nevermind, looks like downloading big files with wget is slow too. The downloads start at top speed, but in a few seconds are throttled down to a few k/s. Looks like there is something wrong with my laptop.

Thanks anyway guys.

levi · 2019-03-24 18:26:04

Is that true also with curl? Wget is not part of the standard installation at least the last time I did it, so I assume pacman is either spawning curl subshells, or using some web library to get its packages. It's certainly not using wget in any case.

god · 2019-03-24 20:28:11

levi wrote:

Is that true also with curl? Wget is not part of the standard installation at least the last time I did it, so I assume pacman is either spawning curl subshells, or using some web library to get its packages. It's certainly not using wget in any case.

Yep, same thing happens in curl, downloads start at around 1.5Mb/s and in 5 to 10 seconds sink to 30kb/s and stay there. And downloading something with the browser get the same results.

I'm testing the hdd speeds, just in case, but it looks fine, I can copy things very fast locally, so the problem is not there either...

The one last thing I can think of is that the network interface is broken in some way, but it is weird that downloads start at full speed for a few seconds.

levi · 2019-03-24 22:36:50

For me even over wifi, speeds start off higher than they continue, but not to the degree you're looking at. Even an old ST506 hard disc should be able to maintain a faster rate than that; my research suggests it should be able to clock at 5Mb/s resulting in something like a little over 600kB/s. I assume you're using something more modern than ext2, so defragmentation shouldn't be an appreciable problem in my experience either.

I guess there's some buffering going on somewhere in the chain resulting in your initial speeds. Have you any other devices attached to your network, and what sort of speeds are they able to download at? This is a desktop chassis machine presumably, with a PCI based add on card to get these 300mbps speeds (and what sort of connection does that use, from my recollection the technology went straight from 100BaseT to gigabit in a few years with no intermediate steps).

Arch Linux

#1 2019-03-22 11:08:50

Mirrors are painfully slow

#2 2019-03-22 23:16:14

Re: Mirrors are painfully slow

#3 2019-03-23 06:43:24

Re: Mirrors are painfully slow

#4 2019-03-24 10:08:50

Re: Mirrors are painfully slow

#5 2019-03-24 18:26:04

Re: Mirrors are painfully slow

#6 2019-03-24 20:28:11

Re: Mirrors are painfully slow

#7 2019-03-24 22:36:50

Re: Mirrors are painfully slow

Board footer