why doesn't yum stay on the continent

[James Wilkinson]

Jack Howarth wrote:
>       Does anyone know why when yum chooses a mirror to download from that
> it doesn't attempt to use a mirror on the same continent as the user? That
> would seem to be a far more efficient use of the yum mirrors than handing
> US users off to a mirror in New Zealand.

There are a number of reasons.

The most prosaic one is that it isn't trivial for yum to work out which
continent a user is on. So no-one has written code to do *quite* this
(but see later).

It's also not clear that (for example) a Polish mirror will be "more
efficient" than a New York one, if you're located in Dublin. (How fast
are the relevant pipes?) Or that a South African mirror will be more
relevant than a Greek one to an Egyptian. Or that a European mirror will
be "more efficient" if the corporate network routes everything through
American headquarters anyway.

It also has the effect of levelling out the demand on a repository: US
users may well be using the NZ mirror while the Kiwis are asleep,
so the Americans won't be increasing the NZ mirror's *maximum* bandwidth
requirements. Later, the NZ users might use an American mirror while the
NZ one is relatively busy, which *will* decrease the maximum bandwidth
the NZ mirror needs.

But you may be interested in the yum-fastestmirror package for FC5,
which is in Extras:
Summary: Yum plugin which chooses fastest repository from a mirrorlist

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | Ridcully told jokes like a bullfrog did accountancy.
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | They never added up.
                      |     -- "The Last Continent", Terry Pratchett