I'd planned to look into this for a while, mainly because we've had several users complaining about this and I was confronted myself with how utterly annoying this timeout can be when I was working in Bhutan. Currently apt-setup will "hang" for 6 minutes if no security mirror can be reached. The reason this is so long seems to be that the default timeout is 120 seconds and that apt consecutively tries _all_ mirrors in the round robbin (I'm not 100% sure about this though). As there are three IP addresses listed for security.d.o, this adds up to 6 minutes. (The "Acquire::Retries" option had no effect at all.) IMO this is too long. I've applied a patch to apt-setup that reduces the timeout to 30 seconds (per mirror). This is limited apt-setup itself and only for the security mirror, as the availability of the regular mirror will already have been tested with choose-mirror. This also means that if more mirrors are added at any time, the total timeout will increase again. I have not seen an option where the number of mirrors to try can be limited.
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