Re: How useful is apt-spy?

[Wim De Smet <kromagg@gmail.com>]

On 6/14/05, David Jardine <david@jardine.de> wrote:
> Wanting to upgrade from Woody to Sarge and having a slow modem
> (not one of those ultra-modern 56K things), I thought apt-spy
> might be a useful thing to use to find the fastest mirror.  I
> have no complaints about the result because I have no way of
> knowing how much faster or slower it would have been if I
> hadn't used the mirror in Brazil that came out fastest in
> their test.
> 
> However, since apt-spy took 50 minutes to run through all the
> mirrors and the download itself took about 15 hours,  I wonder
> how useful apt-spy's tests were.  I have the feeling that I
> was wasting my time with apt-spy since the potential download
> speeds from the various servers would be unpredictable shortly
> after the sampling, but I don't know how much and how fast
> these things do vary.

When I last tried it the results where less than reliable. I'm not
sure about the theory behind it but with your kind of hardware I
wouldn't have bothered to run apt-spy.

> 
> Might I have been better off just looking for the server
> nearest to me geographically?

yes

greets,
Wim