Re: Comments on the fastestmirror plugin

On 03/12/2010 08:08 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
The yum fastestmirror plugin (yum-plugin-fastestmirror) claims to
evaluate the speed of a bunch of repo mirrors and use the fastest one
relative to the user's location.

However AFAIK what it *actually* does is make a test connection to the
to the candidate mirrors and order them according to response time,
which in many cases is dominated by network latency, which can distort
the results. For well-connected user machines in first-world countries
it probably doesn't matter much, and may have the beneficial effect of
spreading the load over a wider range of mirrors, but for those of us in
a less privileged position it can matter a lot. Ironically, these are
the cases where such an optimization could do the most good.

A case in point: I live in Venezuela and on several recent occasions yum
decided that my closest repo was in Puerto Rico, which as the packet
flies is probably true. However the b/w I got as a result was around 2
or 3kbps.

If there are particular hosts or domains you want to avoid, you can edit
/etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf and add an "exclude" line.
There is a commented-out sample exclude line at the bottom of that file:

#exclude=.gov, facebook

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