Hey!

I was reminded again about substitute download speeds outside of Europe
again today.

There was some feedback when I sent out a message to guix-devel [1], [2]
a while back. I think the rough summary is that there's anecdotal
evidence that a US mirror helps.

1: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2022-05/msg00203.html
2: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2022-07/msg00163.html

While I did stop running a mirror in Singapore, it's now back and from
the discussion on IRC today [3] there was some anecdotal evidence that
this helps with fetching substitutes from China.

3: https://logs.guix.gnu.org/guix/2023-05-25.log#142624

Once again it would be good to gather some data on this, so here are
some test commands. I'm interested to see how France compares with
either the US or Singapore depending on your location. If you think that
none of these locations serve you well, then please say that plus give
some indication of what download speeds you see for things that download
quickly.

France:    wget https://bordeaux.guix.gnu.org/nar/lzip/078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0
US:        wget https://bordeaux-us-east-mirror.cbaines.net/nar/lzip/078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0
Singapore: wget https://bordeaux-singapore-mirror.cbaines.net/nar/lzip/078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0


So please share the output from wget and if you're comfortable doing so,
the rough real world location of where the computer doing the
downloading is.

So as an example, I'm in the United Kingdom, and here's what I see
downloading from bordeaux.guix.gnu.org (France):

→ wget https://bordeaux.guix.gnu.org/nar/lzip/hyc5kb21vfdq9hb3snmkg2xsygbwzzsm-stellarium-23.1
--2023-05-25 15:02:49--  https://bordeaux.guix.gnu.org/nar/lzip/hyc5kb21vfdq9hb3snmkg2xsygbwzzsm-stellarium-23.1
Resolving bordeaux.guix.gnu.org (bordeaux.guix.gnu.org)... 2a0c:e300::58, 185.233.100.56
Connecting to bordeaux.guix.gnu.org (bordeaux.guix.gnu.org)|2a0c:e300::58|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 261054076 (249M) [text/plain]
Saving to: ‘hyc5kb21vfdq9hb3snmkg2xsygbwzzsm-stellarium-23.1’

hyc5kb21vfdq9hb3snmkg2xsygbwzz 100%[==================================================>] 248.96M  3.80MB/s    in 66s     

2023-05-25 15:03:55 (3.78 MB/s) - ‘hyc5kb21vfdq9hb3snmkg2xsygbwzzsm-stellarium-23.1’ saved [261054076/261054076]


My internet connection is slow enough that I don't see much difference
when I try the mirrors.

Let me know if you have any comments or questions, and of course I'm
interested to see how well substitute downloading works for you!

Thanks,

Chris