Scripsit Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > 1. We care about a large lot of people a lot more than we care for an > individual's downloading speed
> 2. Thus we try to keep the mirror load down, and downloading hundreds of > megabytes using multiple connections to multiple sources of the same file > is heavily fronwed upon. Of course, trying to download the _same_ file from several different servers simultaneously would be very wasteful. However it seems to be not what the proposal in this thread is about. As far as I read the proposal, it is about downloading _different_ files from different mirrors - if you have 25 packages to get for your 'apt-get update' operation, download 5 packages from each of 5 different servers, with one connection to each server active at a time. While I cannot see any very common situation where such parallellism would be an advantage, it is not clear that it would increase the load of any or all servers. At least, I cannot see that there would be any ill effects of a hypothetical pseudo-parallel implementation that downloads 5 packages from each of the 5 servers, but sequentially such that only a single connection to a single server is active. And the difference from _that_ to an actual parallel implementation is just to shift the connections each server experiences a bit in time - the number of KB served by each server stays constant. Is your point that a server prefers to push bytes through the connection at a constant rate, and starts wasting resources if the available bandwidth fluctuates because the last-mile ADSL has to be shared with a shifting number of parallel downloads from other servers? But when the bottleneck is closest to the client, enabling parallel downloads would not make much sense anyway. (Of course, Goswin has a valid point that some people have their sources.list deliberately written with a remote, undesirable, server at the end as a _fallback_ option. Therefore parallelism should at best be an _option_, not something that apt starts doing unbidden). > I won't claim this is what happens in Internet-paradise countries, but here > there are two things that affect download speed the most after you get a > last-mile link that is not too slow (say, 384kbit/s or more): I have 768 kb/s at home, and my apt updates through that pipe operate close to its peak capacity. But they are at least one order of magnitude slower than from my desk at work (which is just two or three 100+ Mb/s hops away from the national research backbone). Same mirror in both cases. >From that experience, a last-mile link in the 1 Mb/s range would still seem to be the limiting factor - and therefore people at the end of such links would have little use for parallelism in the first place. -- Henning Makholm "What has it got in its pocketses?" -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]