> You're right... a nice litle application... I don't really understand why I
> can download faster from california sites that
> are so far from me, against sites located in Texas, Luisiana oklahoma etc...
Because physical location isn't the real issue, it's backbone connection
and how many steps you are from them. If you and I are in the same
state,
but using different ISPs, who in turn use different networks, it might
take
twice as many hops, as opposed to a friend in a different state from me,
whose ISP uses the same upstream source (say uunet, or mci or whatever)
> if you check the hops to or from linuxberg, are fewer that from mandrake's
> site... but I get a faster response from this last one.
Keep in mind, that netselect does NOT check how busy a site is, or
bandwidth (at least not directly, ping speed WILL reflect that
though)...
if there are less users on the texas site, you might find them faster
because the site is less busy than the 'mainstream sites' like linuxberg
or linux-mandrake.
But on average, I've found netselect to be a great way to pick a mirror
or an IRC server.... just pass it a list of sites, and tell it to
find the best ones.
I'd LIKE to see the (GPLed) code included in Mandrake Update.... that
way it
would check the mirrors, and suggest the best one(s) in order.
That would be great. Debian hasn't integrated this into apt/dselect
yet, and they should too. The idea is: let software pick where you get
your updates from.... that spreads out the load, reduces heavy traffic
on major sites, etc.... we all benefit when we let the software just
figure out where to get an update from. If people are used to using
ftp.linux-mandrake.com, then we all compete for bandwidth on it, but
if netselect/update just checked and said "the best current mirror for
you is: www.someplace.com" people would use that....
