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Date:      Tue, 6 Jan 2009 13:08:02 +0100
From:      Daniel Bond <db@danielbond.org>
To:        Christopher Arnold <chris@arnold.se>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: freebsd-update painfully slow - slower than source code build of world and kernel
Message-ID:  <08B216B4-79AB-45AB-AB4D-C8CD62196B87@danielbond.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.00.0901061242120.1996@localhost>
References:  <DA7E7739-0631-4B00-8CA8-D8C9E22B2126@danielbond.org> <alpine.BSF.2.00.0901061121530.1996@localhost> <F6385D88-BFAF-47A0-B598-78C971FCBD7C@danielbond.org> <alpine.BSF.2.00.0901061242120.1996@localhost>

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Hi again Christopher,


reading your answer, you are obviously confusing what I am saying  
about freebsd-update with the portsnap program. Also, I also wrote in  
my first post that HTTP_PROXY / Caching proxy server does not help me  
much. This is because I download a lot of "initial tarball  
snapshots".. I would rarely see "Cache hits" in my proxy log. I guess  
I could set something up to fetch nightly via proxy, to keep the data  
in house, for when I need it. I don't want to use a PROXY server, I  
feel this is attacking the problem at the wrong end.

I agree, I am interested to hear the views of the wise ones.  
Personally I'm going back to CVSup until freebsd-update and portsnap  
mirrors are in a more distributed or usable state.



Cheers.



On Jan 6, 2009, at 12:59 PM, Christopher Arnold wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, 6 Jan 2009, Daniel Bond wrote:
>
>> Regarding portsnap in my previous post, I think you misunderstood  
>> me. This is not a new "one time" problem regarding a specific case,  
>> portsnap is allways slow. This is observed from heavy usage of it,  
>> over a long period of time.
>>
> This is not my experience, but shure i realise that mileages can vary.
>
>> Great to see that there will be an update2.freebsd.org -  
>> unfortunately, that a new release generates more traffic than  
>> update-server handles is not acceptable (imho). People should be  
>> able to upgrade to a new release, once it is out. Sadly, I don't  
>> think one more mirror will cut it. Especially if it is going to be  
>> of the same quality as the other portsnap mirrors. Also, sadly CP  
>> isn't looking for more mirrors, while a large chunk of users trying  
>> to upgrade *are* looking for mirrors.
>>
> portsnap is extremly lightweight, so it might be just fine.
>
> But then i am not arguing against you, more and better  
> infrastructure is always good. Lets wait untill the us has woken up  
> (And maybe add some extra time for the right person to look into the  
> current problems) and see what kind of feedback we get from people  
> who have more insight into this issue.
>
>> Look at CVSUP mirrors, they have always worked fine, even directly  
>> after a new release. We even have a few of them here in Norway, and  
>> they are fast as hell. Look how many there are of them, spread  
>> around the world.. This works out great!
>>
> My experience from when i was based in Sweden is the opposit.  
> Shortly after a major release cvsup always had problems syncing due  
> to the load on the servers.
>
>> However, freebsd-update is closed. I've searched the web for how  
>> the protocol works, how the server-part of it works, with metadata,  
>> checksums and all. How the mirroring of it works, basicly. There  
>> are no public available documents on this. Do we have to reverse- 
>> engineer it, or what?
>>
> If we start off with portsnap it is http-based and the in the manual  
> you can find:
> "If you wish to use portsnap to keep a large number of machines up  
> to date, you may wish to set up a caching HTTP proxy.  Since  
> portsnap uses fetch(1) to download updates, setting the HTTP_PROXY  
> environment variable will direct it to fetch updates from the given  
> proxy.  This is much more efficient than mirroring the files on the  
> portsnap server, since the vast majority of files are not needed by  
> any particular client."
>
> So it's straight forward to speed up portsnap. (But then if the  
> central servers break like today this dosn't help.)
>
> Im not shure about freebsd-update, but since they are both written  
> by Colin and the fact that they seem simmilar in config etc. i would  
> guess that the same applies to freebsd-update.
>
> So lets wait for some input from Colin or someone else who know the  
> ins and outs of freebsd-update.
>
> 	/Chris
>
> --
> http://www.arnold.se/chris/
>




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