Re: rsync or wget?

[David Fokkema <dfokkema@ileos.nl>]

On Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 03:53:31AM +1000, bob parker wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 00:48, David Fokkema wrote:
> > Hi group,
> >
> > I've just installed apt-proxy. Should I use rsync or wget for fetching
> > packages? I don't really understand the differences. I do understand
> > that rsync can sync to filesystems by only downloading the differences,
> > but apt-proxy knows what it needs to download, right? Only one package,
> > or a list or something like that, not a whole filesystem. And once a
> > transfer is started, what is the difference in speed between rsync and
> > wget? Does rsync do something very smart?
> >
> > So, basically: should I use rsync or ftp or http servers in my
> > apt-proxy.conf?
> 
> I know nothing about apt-proxy but I do know that wget saturates my rubber 
> band powered dial-up connection and makes browsing very unpleasant while it's 
> going on. rsync does not saturate the link but it gets ~70meg / 8hours 
> whereas ftp/http gets ~100meg in the same time.
> 
> OTOH rsync is very clever indeed when you need to correct a very large file 
> such as an iso. All that gets downloaded initially are md4sums of small 
> segments of the source file to compare with the md4sums of the corresponding 
> segments on your copy. Then correcting segments are d/l and patched as needed.
> 
> I have corrected 2, 700meg isos using rsync, the first took about 5 min and 
> the second about 25 min. Not bad on a dialup connection.
> 
> So my guess is perhaps use wget to establish your mirror and change to rsync 
> to maintain it.

Hmmm... IIUC, wget only supports regetting a file (if the server also
supports it) and this only resumes download at the point it was stopped.
Apparently, rsync _is_ clever.

Thanks,

David