new idea for lunar - auto selecting download mirror using country codes

[Jon South]

Eric Sandall wrote:
> Would the use of netselect[0] be a better idea?
> 
> -sandalle
> 
> [0] http://www.worldvisions.ca/~apenwarr/netselect

In principle that is a neat utility, however seeing that it doesnt
actually test any kind of actual connection, connection speed, and uses
protocols that are likely to be marked as low priority, I wouldn't trust
the results to be very accurate.

For example, everyone knows there are several sourceforge mirrors. Many
of these mirrors are fairly reliable, but vary in speed -- and some even
limit downloading speeds. the OSDN mirror is a prime example of this,
due to the fact that OSDN already hosts all of SF.net, it stands to
reason they would limit the speed of their primary mirror favoring
better speeds from dedicated mirrors.

The OSDN mirror usually limits my downloads between 20 to 30k/sec,
whereas the switch mirror usually spits out my maximum download; however
take a look at this result:

# netselect -v switch.dl.sourceforge.net osdn.dl.sourceforge.net
Running netselect to choose 1 out of 2 addresses.
........................
  264 osdn.dl.sourceforge.net

There may however, be a compromise at the expense of a little time (both
in development and user patience) -- perhaps a script to monitor
download speeds and if it drops below a certain point for a specified
time, switch to the next mirror. However, I dont know if this is
feasibly possible without some serious scripting time, and probably
large changes in the core. And not many devs have that kind of time at
the moment.

-Striker

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