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Installing new packages on my recently installed Ubuntu machine is slow. Fetching apt headers even took me more than three minutes because they are downloaded at ~20kB/s – in my case from at.archive.ubuntu.com – not to mention the actual packages themselves, which are much larger.

  • Is this considered normal in the days after a major version release?

  • What can I do to speed up my downloads? Can I switch to another mirror? Does that even pay off?

  • Or should I wait with the downloads until the big hype has cooled down?

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3 Answers

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Is this considered normal in the days after a major version release?

Definitely.

What can I do to speed up my downloads? Can I switch to another mirror? Does that even pay off?

If you're on the main mirror (is that a mirror if it's the original?), things are going to probably suck pretty hard. The rule of thumb is to use whatever's local to you.

You can change your mirror using the Software Sources dialogue (run software-properties-gtk). I suggest you click other and then click Select Best Server.

If that still doesn't help, you could try guessing which mirror is going to have the most spare bandwidth.

Or should I wait with the downloads until the big hype has cooled down?

You might find that available bandwidth varies based on the time of day. If you use a local mirror and can leave it overnight, you might wake up and find everything complete.

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"Select Best Server" timed out for me, but I took a few random guesses and ran apt-get update until I found a sufficiently fast connection. – slhck Oct 15 '11 at 21:47
That suggests that SBS tries to download a file from each server... If some are under very heavy load, that could mean it doesn't work. Shame. – Oli♦ Oct 15 '11 at 21:52
1  
@slhck - I think "select best server" uses apt-netselect, which uses some combination of ICMP and TCP pings to find the "closest" server. It can fail if your router (or ISP) block whichever one it's trying to do. When it fails, I usually just go by geography. – detly Oct 16 '11 at 3:53
up vote 3 down vote

Great tips so far. One to add: Canadian university servers tend to have lots of spare bandwidth due to the fiber-optic infrastructure in that country. Universities of Calgary or Waterloo seem to give good speeds.

Does that help?

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Well, it reads a bit localized, but yes, the Canadian servers seem to work much faster for me now. – slhck Oct 15 '11 at 21:47
Thanks slhck, yes, the comment is localized to North America. Glad to hear your speeds have improved. – fixedit Oct 15 '11 at 23:27
up vote -2 down vote

Yes. Or a driver is not installed for your network card. Mine is just slow period at downloading,

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"Yes"... yes to what? And why would a network card having no driver slow down a connection? – Nathan Osman Oct 15 '11 at 21:41
No driver usually means no connection. Unless default network card drivers somehow limit to <= 10 mbps and David is on a >=10mbps internet connection, high server load and throttling somewhere in the long series of network links from server to client seem the most likely causes. Default network drivers usually allow >= 100mbps. – fixedit Oct 15 '11 at 23:34

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