Thank you Jonathan for your answer. For now, uncommenting the xfercommand with curl almost totally fix the issue (well, once I decided to stop it because I was waiting for about 2 mins with no result, much harder to stop that way, have to use kill command rather than ^C), but after that it have gone well, I was able to download about 12 files of about 500k each, where I had to go about 3 times to get a 350k files before.
It is not uncommon for the speed reported by curl to go to 0 for 20 seconds, then go as high as 25kB/sec for a short while, then going down to the normal 4kB/s speed. (I know, for most people, 4kB is way too slow, but that's what I expect). So, I suppose this is the out-of-order effect of TCP going on... that is, while it seems to be receiving nothing for the user-land, kernel is receiving packets, but transmit them only to userland when the next packet is received. I guess the 10 sec Timeout would not be so short, if it was really the kernel not receiving the packets for that much time, and not the user-space file not growing. That said, I would have to recompile pacman with a modified timeout to be sure it does really help... but I did not compile much if any packages yet outside the AUR ones. Not sure if it is as simple as makepkg. 2010/2/16, Jonathan Conder <[email protected]>: > On Tue, 2010-02-16 at 09:25 -0500, Paul Dufresne wrote: >> Well, I have lots of errors while downloading packages with pacman, >> and almost never while downloading files from Shiretoko Firefox. >> >> I have tried many mirrors, that's the same for each. >> >> Oh... I use a 56k modem (Intel 536EP Data Fax modem). >> >> But even while downloading in Firefox, it sometimes give me the >> feeling it has stopped downloading for about 40 secs... while pacman >> seems to give up after about 20 secs. >> >> I did not tried yet to download with wget or curl (does pacman use one >> of them?). >> >> Is there a constant I could change in the code, and rebuild it?... I >> did not download the code of pacman yet. > > I am not a pacman developer, but I believe you can search for > 'fetchTimeout' in pacman-3.3.3/lib/libalpm/dload.c and change it from 10 > to whatever you want. Alternatively, you could use XferCommand > in /etc/pacman.conf with wget, curl, etc. Read the man page for details. > > Hope this helps > Jonathan > > >
