David Jardine wrote:
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.I use apt-spy and I think the results are pretty consistent. I have let it rub through all of the mirrors three times over the last few months. Many of the fastest ten sites I had apt-spy output where the same for those three runs. I have additional run apt-spy using the file input option so that it only tested the ten fast servers previously found. Most recently I did this four or five times on different days and I apt-spy gave the same server as the fastest.
Might I have been better off just looking for the server nearest to me geographically?Despite what I said above, in my case every time I have run apt-spy the fastest severs where ones that were either the closest or second closest to me. So if I only had a 56k modem I wouldn't bother.
Thanks for any response that will help me next time. David