Hi Peter,
The machine was never under high load during openSUSE release. It had a remarkably low load during peak times, less than 1.0 accounting for Apache and 1.something accounting for other services running on the machine (mostly rsync, but rsync is mostly busy before release, not after. Once we have released, everything is already synced.).
Do you maybe interpret something else as an assumed load problem? It seems an assumption of yours.
I interpret as overload a timeout while connecting to download.opensuse.org, and I thought to overload because it happened exactly during the release days. We had some complaint on IRC I can remember of.
Is it possible that you were sent to a *mirror* which was overloaded?
I don't know. I remember I could not install patches or add installations sources because the URL could not be found.
Against overloaded mirrors, there are two things that can be done: metalink client will automatically cope with failing mirrors.
- when downloading an ISO image, use a metalink client. download.opensuse.org will give it the list of best mirrors and the
- for zypp/YaST, there is early support for metalinks as well, which would help for the download of repository metadata and packages (which this discussion refers to).
That's my point. Adding a "download.opensuse.org" was not possible immediately after there release. I still remember I could not install patches for that reason.
I *do* see, understand and appreciate your point though, because the situation you describe does transfer to the situation of failing mirrors; for the end user it doesn't make a difference if the redirector fails or the mirror that it is sent to. So your point of adding online stuff at install time is valid of course. However I see possibilities to alleviate this (see above). For 11.1, we won't have this, and in any case we need to be careful to implement online accesses in a way that they don't block anything, can be delayed and fail gracefully.
I have no doubts there are a lot of possibilities to reduce the problem. My main message was that I don't think we need this at all, because the current situation makes a very limited number of users unhappy, and satisfy a lot more users. I don't think we should listen to "bad press" for every detail. OpenSUSE, as any other big distribution, will always receive "bad press". To conclude, I would leave non-oss software at least on the DVD, maybe removing it from the online repositories so that mirrors won't have to worry about it. Regards, Alberto -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org