In https://trac.macports.org/ticket/60509 it is explained that MacPorts uses pings to find nearby servers, and it is claimed nearby servers will likely be the fastest.
I'm not a network engineer, but can say this claim is a myth. The purpose of ping is to measure latency, not bandwidth. Yes, sufficiently low bandwidth will increase ping time. But measuring bandwidth directly involves something else besides pings, such as transferring a sufficiently large amount of data and timing how long it takes to do so. I'm fine with MacPorts claiming to use pings to find nearby servers, but it should not make or repeat the claim that doing so will do a good job of finding the fastest server. Anecdote: for some time, even though I typically use a 60Mbps+ Internet connection (Spectrum) and live ~100km (>30ms) away from the MacPorts servers in Austin, TX, I've opted to not use the UT Austin servers (~1MiBps) because other MacPorts servers such as ykf.ca.*.macports.org (>60ms away) are far faster (~6MiBps, or about as fast as my connection can go). I've also configured MacPorts to prefer downloading distfiles from often-faster CDNs for projects on SourceForge, etc., even though they may be several times farther away than my regional MacPorts distfile mirror, and some of which aren't pingable. (I wonder if MacPorts should even be in the business of defeating the purpose of these CDNs, but I would expect to be told MacPorts has learned to distrust upstream projects with hosting distfiles properly.) Christopher A. Chavez
