Mailinglist Archive: zypp-devel (149 mails)

[Peter Poeml <poeml@xxxxxxx>]

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@xxxxxxxxxxxx (a.k.a. ftpadmin@xxxxxxxx)
         #opensuse-mirrors on freenode.net
Info: http://en.opensuse.org/Mirror_Infrastructure
 
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH
Research & Development