April 30, 2012

An ever-growing mirrors network

As of the time of writing, Debian's mirrors network has around 330 mirrors serving the archive over http, and around 300 serving it over ftp.

This month alone, 6 more mirrors were added. Other 6 more were added last month.

There are mirrors in 73 countries. All this couldn't be possible without the help of the sponsors.

However, some interesting questions arise: do people actually use those new mirrors? is having so many mirrors worth the extra load put on the primary mirrors?

I would personally answer: no, and maybe.

Blogosphere: When was the last time you took a look at the mirrors list and/or tried to find a mirror that served you better?

April 28, 2012

Your APT caching proxy is not that efficient

So you read about an "APT caching proxy" and that it can "save time and network bandwidth."
Sounds like something you should have, right? After all, the trade-off is just some additional disk space. APT already has its own cache at /var/cache/apt/archives/, so part of what the caching proxy would store in disk is already there.

Truth is, for a single client a caching proxy might not provide any benefit and might even cause a slowdown, but for at least one of the alternatives it is even worse: every request that goes through the proxy that requires a download from a mirror creates a new connection.

It is 2012 and a piece of software that aims to "save time and network bandwidth" can't even use keep-alive connections?

You are doing it wrong...

... when you join a team and then every other team member stops working.

(There's a possibility that you are doing such a great job that there's no need of the others, but think about the case when your work or your way of working is killing them.)