Mirror picker - call for testing

[curaga]

I've made a small app to determine the fastest mirror from your location. This should help the complaints on download speeds if (asked to) pop up on first launch of (scm)apps.

Please help test it to see whether it's correct from your location. The binary is up to date, so you can just download that if you don't want to load compiletc.

http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/4.x/x86/tcz/src/mirrorpicker/

[jls]

the result for me is the greek mirros but I think it's better to delete it since it has a very old repo

[bmarkus]

Result is varying. Running it 10 times I got three sites, 60% ftp.vim.org 30% ftp.nluug.nl, 10% a .edu

5 minutes later 100% is ftp.nluug.nl the winner.

[tinypoodle]

...which makes sense as ftp.vim.org and ftp.nluug.nl basically resolve to same IP's

[curaga]

Mirrors do vary in speed a bit, so that part's natural. Probably a good time to update the extension from the wiki, will do that soon.

edit: Updated. Now at 15 mirrors with the greek ones removed.

[SamK]

Over a period of one hour:
30% ibiblio
40% vim
40% nluug

Setting mirror when offered also works OK.

An idea, how about adding an option to (SCM)Apps in addition to the existing option "Select Mirror".  It might work such that the fastest mirror is automatically scanned for and selected prior to a download.  Retaining the existing "Select Mirror" option will also allow users who prefer to use a specific mirror to do so.
   

[curaga]

Yep, there should be an option to manually launch this in addition to popping it up at first use.

As for selecting a mirror automatically, I think that giving a choice like the app currently does is preferable. It's not much overhead, and it would be more user friendly.

[SamK]

...and it would be more user friendly.

Not suggesting that this is the only way to do it, but it is what I had in mind.

To the list of sites in mirrors.tcz, a further (standard) entry could be added.  Something along the lines of "Use Fastest Available Mirror". 

As is presently the case, a user could choose any entry.   

• Selecting a specific site will download only from that site
• Selecting "Use Fastest Available Mirror" will (before each download session) automatically scan, select and download from the fastest site

To me this is quite a friendly way to do it.
   


Edit
improve clarity

[curaga]

That would work too, but it'd complicate the code more (having to check for this special string after picking) than adding a menu item.

[gerald_clark]

How are you determining mirror speed?
Ping delays are not a good indication of file transfer speed.

[curaga]

I download the info.lst.gz file and measure that speed.

It's still a small file to not to harm the mirrors, but should be better indicative of the speed.