>From my experience, it changes very little, especially in the US where there are thirteen mirror sites. I'm told that really isn't enough to meet the demand here, so there are several off-shore sites added to the mix, which I suppose could account for your more lengthy sessions. Changing it to US won't eliminate those off-shore sites from occasionally being selected in the round-robin scheme of things.
The freshclam algorithm attempts to determine a set of sites closest to you by examining your IP address. Not a perfect solution, but it usually works to be close enough. In my work with ClamXav users, I normally try to discourage them from changing the setting unless they are experiencing a high rate of connectivity issues with sites that they probably should not be using. Doing so is not a standard ClamXav preference option and changing the freshclam.conf file is not a trivial task for the average Mac user. There have been occasions in Europe where a mirror site has prevented access from certain IP blocks, which they aren't supposed to do, but there is really no way to prevent it. In that case, there did seem to be improvement by changing the CC. Of course, if you are going to be checking for updates more than once an hour, then you are required to change it for load balancing purposes. Again, this is not something the average Mac user can do (other than manually), even if they wanted to, but enterprise sites must play by different rules. -Al- On 1/25/13 12:54 AM, "Lee Graber" wrote: > Thanks Jim. Is this different than db.local.clamav.net? That is what my > conf file was pre-populated with when I installed the package. I changed it > to "us" but I am wondering if that is actually changing anything. Thank for > the tip on cron task. That seems like a good idea. :) > > On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 2:53 PM, Jim Preston <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 01/24/2013 11:40 AM, Lee Graber wrote: >> >>> I am just starting to try and get clamd + freshclam running on some Ubuntu >>> servers running on EC2 servers in the US Standard Region (east coast). The >>> documentation talks about specifying a mirror which is close to you but it >>> seems to default to the round-robin endpoint. I have run freshclam a >>> number >>> of times and sometimes it takes 14 seconds and sometimes it takes 6 >>> minutes. I can see that the ip address is different on the calls and am >>> trying to figure out how I can get it to take 14 seconds all the time :). >>> I >>> can't find anything that says there is a mirror in the Amazon DataCenter. >>> How can I make this behavior reliable fast. >>> >>> Thanks >>> Lee >>> >> You should have set up freshclam.conf to use the US mirrors >> (DatabaseMirror db.us.clamav.net). The update time will vary depending on >> whether it has to download any updates and the load on the particular >> mirror it connects to. The round-robin functionality is by design to spread >> load and help when a mirror goes down for any reason. >> >> You may also want to change the update frequency. I am running freshclam >> as a cron task and set it to not be on the hour, e.g. I update at 5 minutes >> after the hour to try and hit the mirrors at a low load time. >> >> >> -- >> Jim Preston _______________________________________________ Help us build a comprehensive ClamAV guide: visit http://wiki.clamav.net http://www.clamav.net/support/ml
