Re: Do substitutes download slowly for you? / Speeding up substitute delivery/mirrors

["Philip McGrath" <philip@philipmcgrath.com>]

Hi,

On Thu, May 25, 2023, at 9:52 AM, Christopher Baines wrote:
> 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

Thanks again for setting this up! The us-east mirror makes a big difference for me. The wget output is below, but anecdotally, last week, when I installed Guix on a new Debian installation, my first `guix pull` failed maybe three times due to substitute timeouts before I enabled the mirror. After enabling the mirror, it succeed on the first attempt.

Tangentially, a few months ago I was using a very poorly connected network that had the additional annoying property of disconnecting every 10 minutes or so. I got stuck downloading the beginning of one large nar enough times that eventually I gave up. I found, though, that `wget -c` was able to complete the download (though it took several attempts). Adding some similar resume functionality might at least help to mitigate the impact of slow downloads.

>
> 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.
>

Here are results from Florida, US:

philip@avalon:/tmp$ wget https://bordeaux.guix.gnu.org/nar/lzip/078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0
--2023-05-25 16:27:53--  https://bordeaux.guix.gnu.org/nar/lzip/078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0
Resolving bordeaux.guix.gnu.org (bordeaux.guix.gnu.org)... 185.233.100.56, 2a0c:e300::58
Connecting to bordeaux.guix.gnu.org (bordeaux.guix.gnu.org)|185.233.100.56|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 208615205 (199M) [text/plain]
Saving to: ‘078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0’

078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw 100%[=============>] 198.95M  10.1MB/s    in 13s     

2023-05-25 16:28:07 (14.9 MB/s) - ‘078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0’ saved [208615205/208615205]

philip@avalon:/tmp$ wget https://bordeaux-us-east-mirror.cbaines.net/nar/lzip/078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0
--2023-05-25 16:28:49--  https://bordeaux-us-east-mirror.cbaines.net/nar/lzip/078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0
Resolving bordeaux-us-east-mirror.cbaines.net (bordeaux-us-east-mirror.cbaines.net)... 5.161.49.48
Connecting to bordeaux-us-east-mirror.cbaines.net (bordeaux-us-east-mirror.cbaines.net)|5.161.49.48|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 208615205 (199M) [text/plain]
Saving to: ‘078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0.1’

078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw 100%[=============>] 198.95M  55.8MB/s    in 3.8s    

2023-05-25 16:28:53 (52.9 MB/s) - ‘078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0.1’ saved [208615205/208615205]

philip@avalon:/tmp$ wget https://bordeaux-singapore-mirror.cbaines.net/nar/lzip/078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0
--2023-05-25 16:29:17--  https://bordeaux-singapore-mirror.cbaines.net/nar/lzip/078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0
Resolving bordeaux-singapore-mirror.cbaines.net (bordeaux-singapore-mirror.cbaines.net)... 64.176.80.78, 2401:c080:1400:71df:5400:4ff:fe73:757d
Connecting to bordeaux-singapore-mirror.cbaines.net (bordeaux-singapore-mirror.cbaines.net)|64.176.80.78|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 208615205 (199M) [text/plain]
Saving to: ‘078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0.2’

078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw 100%[=============>] 198.95M  11.4MB/s    in 19s     

2023-05-25 16:29:37 (10.5 MB/s) - ‘078vr3r8mn3yrwzwxw64hmcyshic9p3q-stellarium-0.21.0.2’ saved [208615205/208615205]