On Apr 28, 2011, at 11:19 , brian d foy wrote: > On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 4:44 AM, Adam Kennedy <a...@ali.as> wrote: >> I think I may have implemented what you're looking for several years >> ago for JSAN, which has a client that auto-detected appropriate >> mirrors in a few seconds each time it starts. >> >> http://search.cpan.org/~adamk/Mirror-URI-0.90/lib/Mirror/YAML.pm > > I was looking at this, but it seems like the idea of downloading a > small file from several mirrors isn't a good way to figure out which > mirrors to use, especially with a large number of mirrors. > > I guess you could randomly choose some mirrors and keep checking until > you find some that are fast enough. > > However, shouldn't knowing something about the location can start that > more quickly when there are several hundred mirrors?
No need for everyone to contact all mirrors. http://mirrors.cpan.org/ constantly monitors CPAN mirrors for freshness. This data can be obtained in JSON form at http://mirrors.cpan.org/cpan-json.txt for example { "url" : "http://ftp.wa.co.za/pub/CPAN/";, "city" : "Cape Town", "region" : null, "country" : "South Africa", "continent" : "Africa", "cc" : "za", "age" : "1303986001", "last_status" : "ok", "last_ok_probe" : "1304001901" }, It checks each mirror by fetching a file which is constantly updated on the CPAN master site. The age field is the epoch timestamp for that file Graham.
