How useful is apt-spy?

[David Jardine <david@jardine.de>]

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.

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

Thanks for any response that will help me next time.

David

-- 
David Jardine

"Running Debian GNU/Linux and
loving every minute of it."  -L. von Sacher-M.(1835-1895)