[forwarded email: cygwin mirrors and installation]

[Christopher Faylor]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2003 at 09:18:54PM -0400, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
>On Mon, 6 Oct 2003, Doug Porter wrote:
>>I run archive.progeny.com, one of the Cygwin mirror sites.  Our Cygwin
>>mirror is heavily used; averaging around 140 GB per day.
>>
>>I was amazed by the demand for Cygwin, at least until I saw how mirrors
>>were presented in the Cygwin installer.  They are listed in
>>alphabetical order and none of the locality information is provided
>>(putting us at the top of the list, and as the default selection).
>>After talking to other administrators, I found mirrors further down the
>>list do far less Cygwin traffic.
>>
>>Would the Cygwin people please look into fixing this?  The usage is not
>>creating a problem at the moment, but it does seem a little silly for
>>our mirror to carry so much of the load.  Thank you.
>
>Hmm, I'd guess this puts the mirror list prioritization by response
>time rather high on the TODO list...

I never considered it before but that would tend to cause the mirrors
with the best response time to be chosen almost exclusively, wouldn't
it?  That might end up having the opposite effect from what is intended.

I guess we could randomly sort the mirrors but, with all of the people
who have already chosen archive.progeny.com as their default mirror,
I'm not sure it would have much effect.

>Of course, another reason why that mirror is so heavily used is that it's
>a good high-speed mirror with timely updates, at least in the US.

Right.  I don't think there is a simple solution to this.

cgf