Question about slow downloads

Hello :slight_smile:

I’m trying to work out whether it’s an arch/server issue or a setting I need to tweak in system setup. Testing out the net install on laptop for the first time (awesome!), installing Mate, and with the aim of putting onto main system. Couple of issues with 2 packages, where downloads take up to 25 minutes to complete.

hello,you set the mirror (s)

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Hello JR29 :slight_smile: I’d used the Welcome screen to run reflector, choosing local mirrors, and saved the list. The more I think about this, it looks like individual servers, but the numix-icon-theme-git is github, so I’m not sure, unless they’re having some down time.

I haven’t posted yet on chaotic-aur but did on the TKG issues page. They reassured me there are no changes to wine-tkg package.

wine-tkg-fsync-vkd3d-git is an 86MB package so depending on your connection to the chaotic-aur server that could take some time. 25 minutes seems like too long but I suppose it depends what your connection is like.

numix-icon-theme-git is only 4MB and is also on chaotic-aur so it shouldn’t have come from github.

Are you sure that you got those from chaotic-aur and not aur? Because if they came from aur that could have been the time they took to build, not download.

As side note, do you know/trust the people behind chaotic-aur? I ask because when you enable a 3rd party repo, you are basically giving the people with the ability to post packages to those repos the ability to run any code as root on your machine. I am not saying they are not trustworthy because I don’t know them, I am just wanting to make sure that you do find them trustworthy enough to take the risk.

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I think it might be a problem with the servers or the internet connection you have. I have selected servers for India, United States, United Kingdom, Worldwide, Finland, Singapore, Netherlands, and Sweden and Switzerland. My internet connection is 200 Mbps and I get an average of 5 MB/s.

That’s a lot of choices! Only the first in the final list usually gets used, btw, so make sure that one is quick. India, I hear, has been having some troubles with mirrors - and Germany is the most recommended cure. Sometimes the closest ones are not the best choices! Of course, US, France etc are OK too, AFAIK.

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As a general rule of thumb, it is recommended to use mirrors close to you.
Far away mirrors can be really slow, and essentially only waste bandwidth on many levels.

So usually your current location/country (if it has Arch mirrors) and possibly some neighboring country or countries in the mirror list should be good enough.

India has a mirror ar IIT-K (an engineering college). It used to give decent speeds, but during the covid lockdown it became very slow. (I cannot guarantee if the slowing down is actually related to the lockdown) From what I hear, it should be back up by now. The ind.pkgbuild was also slow for me when I last checked few months back. I temporarily used Chinese mirrors, because that’s our neighbor country, and it gave good speeds. Finally switched to European mirrors, because I was regularly having 404 errors on Chinese mirrors.
European mirrors have been giving good experience. Downloads utilize my complete network capacity (a mere 30Mbit/s). But every now and then there’s a package which downloads very slow.

Still I think I should be using nearer mirrors. Wasting bandwidth isn’t a good thing.

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