Hi Stano, On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 09:32:42PM +0200, Stanislav Visnovsky wrote:

Dňa Tuesday 30 September 2008 02:10:37 Peter Poeml ste napísal:

...

Hi,

would it be possible to show the mirror which is accessed when downloading a package?

(Technically, the download client is following redirects and the actualy URL needs to be shown, not just the first URL that was contacted but that redirected to another URL)

It is a long-standing problem that this information is lacking and it makes debugging and optimizing much harder than necessary, because this information is only available deeply buried in some logfile.

We need this information for two reasons:

1) Debugging - to see which URL was accessed when something goes wrong, like a mirror timing out. For example, Whenever a mirror returns garbage, it takes a lot of additional time to find out which one, because all reports are lacking the critical detail, and it is usually hard to find it out later.

2) Optimizing the load sharing between different mirrors - to distinguish slow mirrors from fast ones. For example, I am very much in need of information about the situation in the US, but even though people in the US run installations for me and are willing to send me logs, I can't get this information.

Do you want the information in the log or to be shown in e.g. zypper -vvv ?

Shown, in normal output. It is already in some log I believe, I don't know which one exactly anymore though. Thing is, users won't be able to tell us anything useful if they weren't shown the information. And later it is not reproducible. At least in a failure situation the URLs must be shown. That alone wouldn't give us the chance to find out about slow mirrors, but at least it would allow to debug problems. Real life example #1: If a mirror is behind a firewall that lets every 10th connection stall (so the transfer hangs or the connection is reset), it usually takes weeks (!) to find out about it. But it hits virtually every user from mirrors country during the time. We have had this 4 times during the last 18 months. Real life example #2: I got feedback from someone who did a network install of openSUSE 11.0 from download.opensuse.org, located in the US. He had to let it running overnight because it took a long time. Next morning, the install hadn't even completed. YaST was hanging and waiting for somebody to hit retry. Problem is, it took us a lot of work to find out which mirror was at fault. We actually had to repeat the install, I had to follow the log and live watching his machine accessing download.opensuse.org, to see where it was redirected, and where it spent most time (while downloading some package). We found a mirror which was really slow, and I could disable it. I have a suspicion though, that we have more such mirrors, because I have got some similar reports from recently. But how to find out? People only complain about slowness, without the ability to give any useful detail. See http://news.opensuse.org/2008/09/23/upcoming-factory-changes/#comments for examples of this. So this affects both YaST and zypper, I though zypp-devel would be a good start because I guess that zypp needs to provide the information.

And of course, you will not like this ;-) - I suggest to either open a bug report or file a feature request (openSUSE.org one). Mail here will almost certainly get lost.

Thanks, Peter -- Contact: admin@opensuse.org (a.k.a. ftpadmin@suse.com) #opensuse-mirrors on freenode.net Info: http://en.opensuse.org/Mirror_Infrastructure SUSE LINUX Products GmbH Research & Development