I agree with Mark. In practice, IP->loc databases work quite well, and usually latency and/or hop count is all you really need to pick a good mirror.
Btw, Mark, I love your site - especially your cacheability engine.
Mark Nottingham wrote:
Traditionally mirrors provide a reference to their geographic location. While by no means a guarantee to improved transfer speeds, this is a useful reference, especially for clients that wish to use a single source for data transfers (as opposed to parallel downloads).
I disagree; there are many, many factors to take into account when selecting a mirror; geographic location is quite low on the list, and can be found through other means in any case (see RFC1876).
-- Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks http://onionnetworks.com/
