Hi again Christopher,
reading your answer, you are obviously confusing what I am saying
about freebsd-update with the portsnap program. Also, I also wrote in
my first post that HTTP_PROXY / Caching proxy server does not help me
much. This is because I download a lot of "initial tarball
snapshots".. I would rarely see "Cache hits" in my proxy log. I guess
I could set something up to fetch nightly via proxy, to keep the data
in house, for when I need it. I don't want to use a PROXY server, I
feel this is attacking the problem at the wrong end.
I agree, I am interested to hear the views of the wise ones.
Personally I'm going back to CVSup until freebsd-update and portsnap
mirrors are in a more distributed or usable state.
Cheers.
On Jan 6, 2009, at 12:59 PM, Christopher Arnold wrote:
On Tue, 6 Jan 2009, Daniel Bond wrote:
Regarding portsnap in my previous post, I think you misunderstood
me. This is not a new "one time" problem regarding a specific case,
portsnap is allways slow. This is observed from heavy usage of it,
over a long period of time.
This is not my experience, but shure i realise that mileages can vary.
Great to see that there will be an update2.freebsd.org -
unfortunately, that a new release generates more traffic than
update-server handles is not acceptable (imho). People should be
able to upgrade to a new release, once it is out. Sadly, I don't
think one more mirror will cut it. Especially if it is going to be
of the same quality as the other portsnap mirrors. Also, sadly CP
isn't looking for more mirrors, while a large chunk of users trying
to upgrade *are* looking for mirrors.
portsnap is extremly lightweight, so it might be just fine.
But then i am not arguing against you, more and better
infrastructure is always good. Lets wait untill the us has woken up
(And maybe add some extra time for the right person to look into the
current problems) and see what kind of feedback we get from people
who have more insight into this issue.
Look at CVSUP mirrors, they have always worked fine, even directly
after a new release. We even have a few of them here in Norway, and
they are fast as hell. Look how many there are of them, spread
around the world.. This works out great!
My experience from when i was based in Sweden is the opposit.
Shortly after a major release cvsup always had problems syncing due
to the load on the servers.
However, freebsd-update is closed. I've searched the web for how
the protocol works, how the server-part of it works, with metadata,
checksums and all. How the mirroring of it works, basicly. There
are no public available documents on this. Do we have to reverse-
engineer it, or what?
If we start off with portsnap it is http-based and the in the manual
you can find:
"If you wish to use portsnap to keep a large number of machines up
to date, you may wish to set up a caching HTTP proxy. Since
portsnap uses fetch(1) to download updates, setting the HTTP_PROXY
environment variable will direct it to fetch updates from the given
proxy. This is much more efficient than mirroring the files on the
portsnap server, since the vast majority of files are not needed by
any particular client."
So it's straight forward to speed up portsnap. (But then if the
central servers break like today this dosn't help.)
Im not shure about freebsd-update, but since they are both written
by Colin and the fact that they seem simmilar in config etc. i would
guess that the same applies to freebsd-update.
So lets wait for some input from Colin or someone else who know the
ins and outs of freebsd-update.
/Chris
--
http://www.arnold.se/chris/
_______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
