check fastest mirror

[Dennis Veatch]

On Tuesday 29 August 2006 10:13, Jean Michel Bruenn wrote:
> Hello,
>
> > 1) Traceroute packets only tell you the number of hops and the speed at
> > which those hops decide to send back those useless packets. I say
> > useless because most routers QoS controls are configured to put any
> > packets that do not serve much purpose (icmp, ttl exceeded, etc) below
> > any important packets (ftp, http, established connections, etc). This
> > causes skew on the timings of how fast *real* packets will return.
>
snip


> >
> > The moral of this story? If you're going to test something (e.g. video
> > games), dont test them with anything other (e.g. 80 year old men) than
> > what you plan on using afterwards (e.g. kids, teens, etc).
>
> ack. But we aren't talking about a videogame.

Your missing the point. If you are going to test for http download, using ping 
or traceroute is not an effective way to determine fastest path. You should 
be using something that runs over, in this example http.

>
> > If you really want to test how well a mirror works, you need to actually
> > download something from it; not poke at it with a stick. Your best bet
> > is to download a fairly large file (depending on your bandwidth) at
> > least twice at two different times (peak/off-peak usage). This will
> > obviously take a considerable amount of time, and for the most-part wont
> > gain you much benefit. I wouldn't use a traceroute tool to guage my
> > HTTP/FTP download speeds any farther than I could throw the damned
> > thing, and neither should anyone else.
> >
> > -Striker
>
> at least striker is right, but, other distributions are using it, why we
> aren't? Whats with other developers, no one wants to say something to this
> here?
>

I am not a fan of following the crowd. What other distributions do is their 
own business. If Lunar and it's grandpappy "followed the crowd" and NOT used 
bash as the basis of a package management system, we would not be having this 
conversation.

This issue has been brought up three or four times over as many past years. 
And the pro-arguments have always been the same as presented now. While I 
agree, IN THEORY is sounds really great. To date no one has been able to 
offer an accurate, reliable, non-invasive (that is don't annoy the host on 
the other end) way to achieve it.

dveatch
-- 
You can tuna piano but you can't tune a fish.