Most repositories appear to be down or VERY SLOW!

[Ole Juul]

Re: Most repositories appear to be down or VERY SLOW!

I donno. Before my 10Mb/s connection I had a 7Mb/sec RR connection that was dropped to 3.5Mb/sec due to RR bungling, so I switched to EarthLink. With 3.5Mb/s RR I could never get over 300Mb/s dl speed. Theoretically one should be able to get around 85% of ideal bandwidth so my browsing speed should be around 850Kb/s and my DL speed should be twice that. I usually get it by using a DL accelerator like filezilla or aria2c, which gives me a reliable 1.7Mb/s on fast sites.

The 85% makes sense from what I see on speedtest. net, but for actual downloads I've never gotten past about 140Kbps. Which brings me back to my original question: How does Kubuntu divide up the incoming streams? I am curious to find out where the limiting factor comes from. Different sources give the same result, so the bottleneck must be either my ISP or my OS.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Most repositories appear to be down or VERY SLOW!

I don't think Kubuntu or FireFox divide up incoming streams. That would require threading and I know that FF doesn't create mutiple threads for a single download. That's why I use Prozilla (not Filezilla as I previously mentioned) or Aria2c. Aria2c is in the repository and it automatically creates four download threads on default. In that case the big speed limiting factor is how many times a site will let you log in for downloads from the same IP address. Some block you at one, some at two, but many of the fast sites let you create as many streams as your PC can handle.

[Snowhog]

Re: Most repositories appear to be down or VERY SLOW!

Aria2c - Just visited the project page: aria2 project. Looks interesting. I'm going to install it and give it a go by downloading a Kubuntu Karmic iso file and see how much faster it is over a regular download.

[Ole Juul]

Re: Most repositories appear to be down or VERY SLOW!

GreyGeek: I don't think Kubuntu or FireFox divide up incoming streams.

Interesting. I guess there is a lot I don't understand about this. I listen to internet radio and browse the net at the same time as I am downloading a file. Is that not threading? The "radio" download takes up maybe 96Kbps but doesn't seem to effect the download speed. It seems to me that if I turned off the "radio" then my download speed should increase by 96Kbps - assuming that the server has the bandwidth, of course. However, since download speed appears to be relatively constant (80-140Kbps) then it would make sense (to me) that there is some "throttle" at either the "standard server", my OS, or the ISP. I'm terribly confused.

Snowhog: Just visited the project page: aria2 project. Looks interesting. I'm going to install it and give it a go by downloading a Kubuntu Karmic iso file and see how much faster it is over a regular download.

I'm curious to hear how that goes!

[GreyGeek]

Re: Most repositories appear to be down or VERY SLOW!

I listen to internet radio and browse the net at the same time as I am downloading a file. Is that not threading?

AFAICT, FireFox calls each connection to a single webpage a "pipeline", which is probably a thread, and sets the default limit to 4. (about:config - network.http.pipelining.maxrequests;4) Some folks will tell you to set that value to 30, but that is nonsense because FF limits it internally to 8, regardless of how big that config setting is. There is another setting, network.http.max-connections, which is set to 30. This setting, IIUIC, indicates how many different websites FF can connect to at the same time. If each tab connects to a different web site that would seem to indicate that one is limited to 30 different tabs, unless that value is increased.

Some will also tell you to create a new value called “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and to set that value to “0″. All this does is start displaying the information on the webpage sooner.

However, as far as downloads go, I don't see any configuration settings which open more than one pipeline-thread to a specific file the way prozilla or aria2c does. So, my FF download speeds rarely, if every, go over 450 kb/s.