On 06-01-26, Thibaut wrote:
> 
> 
> > Le 6 janv. 2026 à 15:27, Baptiste Jonglez <[email protected]> a 
> > écrit :
> > 
> > I like provocative thinking ;)
> 
> Then here’s another thought :)
> 
> > One thing that is maybe not clear: we don't manage the mirrors ourselves,
> > and the mirrors are not used by downloads.openwrt.org.  All "official"
> > traffic is already handled by the CDN and our single download server, with
> > old releases handled by the archive server.  So, mirrors don't cost us
> > much in term of time and infrastructure (except this traffic problem).
> > So far, the machinery is just "the rsync server is open to all".
> > 
> > There are two kind of mirrors as far as I know: "far-flung institutions
> > showing their support" as you say, and people running private mirrors
> > (which I guess they have good reasons for, maybe they have large fleets of
> > OpenWrt devices)
> 
> About that. I can give you an excellent reason to run a local mirror when you 
> depend on packages repositories being available and « working », e.g. when 
> frequently building lots of images using IB: when the CDN becomes out of sync 
> (say Packages doesn’t match the actual files available for download - and it 
> happens quite often), you’re screwed.

This is a separate issue we should fix.  I believe we can just disable CDN
caching for packages and Packages* files, and keep caching only for images
and SDK/IB.  I will try this.

> As for the crazy amount of traffic, as mentioned on IRC I believe it’s partly 
> due to our (honestly broken) way of updating the packages repositories: 
> updating the entire archive whenever a single commit that affects a single 
> package is pushed cannot scale.
> 
> I believe your proposal simply delays the inevitable: it will push down this 
> problem to tier-1 mirrors but eventually we will be caught back again as the 
> number of packages and platforms grow.
> 
> I believe it would make more sense to work on having a saner build system 
> that can (build - that would also save CPU cycles - and) update only actually 
> modified packages. There’s been preliminary work in phase1 to address this 
> (at least for the ‘update’ part). Then all forms of mirror traffic should 
> naturally decrease as untouched bits remain valid in cache.

Agreed but this is a much bigger undertaking.

As suggested by Paul and Hauke, we will exclude snapshots from rsync
mirroring as a first step, this should already help quite a lot (well,
"delay the inevitable" as you say ;) ).

The only thing that will be constantly updated by mirrors are packages for
the active stable releases, typically the last two major releases.

Baptiste

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