# Should I migrate from Arch due to low repository speeds ?



## MetalheadGautham (Aug 1, 2008)

I have been using arch linux for some time now and I find it to be one of the best distros ever. Its very simple and easy to use, and configuring is very easy since only a handful of text files need to be edited. KDEmod simply rocks.

But I have one major issue with it - its repositories are simply too slow. I am not able to download anything at all during the night time UL BSNL H500  broadband surfing from the repos, since I get sick speeds like 15kbps. But at noon and evening, I get blazing fast download speeds, which are useless since I can't use that time for downloading anything. Rankmirrors script revealed that the fastest mirror I can access is also just 16kbps in speed right now. I don't know what to do now. Can anyone help and/or advice me here ?

Is there any hack for pacman to make it download files in paralell, i.e, many files at a time ? Or can I somehow make wget, which pacman uses, to accelerate downloads ?

I really don't want to leave arch and KDEmod, but I think I am being forced to, by slow speeds. I am considering going for CentOS 5.2, whose DVD I am downloading from internode.net. What do you guys say ? What will be the speed difference between CentOS and arch ? What about the new debian testing release ?


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## Pat (Aug 1, 2008)

pacman does not use wget by default. And yes, you can use a download accelerator of your choice with pacman (axel for example)


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 1, 2008)

Pat said:


> pacman does not use wget by default. And yes, you can use a download accelerator of your choice with pacman (axel for example)


tell me how


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## Pat (Aug 1, 2008)

Please see your pacman.conf. IIRC, they have given a few examples as comments in that file.


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 1, 2008)

Tell me a commandline download accelerator that is reliable. Quick.


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## Pat (Aug 1, 2008)

Yes sir. Your order is my command 

Try axel (as already mentioned in previous post) or prozilla.

Also try out curl as mentioned in the following blog article. It will be useful especially when downloading large files like, for example, distro isos.

*linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2007/03/tip-download-accelerator-for-linux.html
Read the section: *Using Curl to speed up your downloads*


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## FilledVoid (Aug 1, 2008)

Take a PowerPill


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## debsuvra (Aug 1, 2008)

MetalheadGautham said:


> But I have one major issue with it - its repositories are simply too slow. I am not able to download anything at all during the night time UL BSNL H500  broadband surfing from the repos, since I get sick speeds like 15kbps. But at noon and evening, I get blazing fast download speeds, which are useless since I can't use that time for downloading anything. Rankmirrors script revealed that the fastest mirror I can access is also just 16kbps in speed right now. I don't know what to do now.



^^^Thats why I had to ditch Arch and switch over to slower Ubuntu 8.04.1 again.

I think BSNL is slowing down the speed sometimes in the night unlimited hours since I saw some other users in the vicinity were getting good speeds over the same mirror using Airtel. Can someone confirm it ?


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## FilledVoid (Aug 1, 2008)

> ^^^Thats why I had to ditch Arch and switch over to slower Ubuntu 8.04.1 again.
> 
> I think BSNL is slowing down the speed sometimes in the night unlimited hours since I saw some other users in the vicinity were getting good speeds over the same mirror using Airtel. Can someone confirm it


I get awesome speeds to the morning and about upto 50-80 kbps in the regular times. I usually schedule updates at 7:00 am -8:00 and have my system shutdown at 7:55 .


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## debsuvra (Aug 1, 2008)

FilledVoid said:


> I get awesome speeds to the morning and about upto 50-80 kbps in the regular times. I usually schedule updates at 7:00 am -8:00 and have my system shutdown at 7:55 .



Are u using Home 500 man ? If yes, then u call 50-80 kbps awesome ? Arch repos give at least 180-200 kbps in other times of the day but in that hourspan, it's horrible. I also experienced the slightly better speeds from 7 to 8 AM but that is not close enough to the speed we should have.


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## FilledVoid (Aug 1, 2008)

> Are u using Home 500 man ? If yes, then u call 50-80 kbps awesome ? Arch repos give at least 180-200 kbps in other times of the day but in that hourspan, it's horrible. I also experienced the slightly better speeds from 7 to 8 AM but that is not close enough to the speed we should have.


Yes I'm using Home 500. Yes I call it Awesome because of couple of things.

1. Arch doesn't have a server anywhere close to us. 
2. If you notice the time difference theres going to be more traffic in the night than the morning. 
3. On Ubuntu the download speeds were so pathetic from IIT that I started downloading updates from Mongolia. 

You might find it horrible but I find it suitable for my needs.


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## nitish_mythology (Aug 1, 2008)

Join the bright forces, get 'Zenwalk'....

_ Hope its not sounding like an advertisement  _


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## 4T7 (Aug 1, 2008)

nitish_mythology said:


> Join the bright forces, get 'Zenwalk'....
> 
> _ Hope its not sounding like an advertisement  _


Join the brightest forces, get Slackware


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## debsuvra (Aug 1, 2008)

FilledVoid said:


> Yes I'm using Home 500. Yes I call it Awesome because of couple of things.
> 
> 1. Arch doesn't have a server anywhere close to us.
> 2. If you notice the time difference theres going to be more traffic in the night than the morning.
> ...



But I got some 180-200 kbps speed from arch Australia servers, so why 50-80 would be amazing ?

On the other hand, Taiwanese ubuntu servers are the best I've seen in many days for Ubuntu. I presume praka can also confirm it. The IIT-M repo simply sucks. 



nitish_mythology said:


> Join the bright forces, get 'Zenwalk'....
> 
> _ Hope its not sounding like an advertisement  _



No it is not an advertisement.



4T7 said:


> Join the brightest forces, get Slackware



Now it starts looking like an advertisement.


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 1, 2008)

Pat said:


> Yes sir. Your order is my command
> 
> Try axel (as already mentioned in previous post) or prozilla.
> 
> ...


/me heard lots about curl and even used it in firefox via flashgot extention.
I heard its wget's arch rival. is it really that good ?


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## FilledVoid (Aug 1, 2008)

> But I got some 180-200 kbps speed from arch Australia servers, so why 50-80 would be amazing ?
> 
> On the other hand, Taiwanese ubuntu servers are the best I've seen in many days for Ubuntu. I presume praka can also confirm it. The IIT-M repo simply sucks.



I was mentioning that I get 50-80 in most times regardless of where or when. Hence its great for me. I also get good speeds in the times mentioned above by OP. I believe I did a 8 MB update today and the average at the end was about 192 kbps but this was at 8:00 am I believe. 

Anyway Ive had the best experience with Pacman then with Ubuntus update system. I don't see myself changing anytime soon.


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 1, 2008)

offtopic: kdemod4 is sooooo damn fast and sexy  but where is kde control center ?


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## mehulved (Aug 1, 2008)

4T7 said:


> Join the brightest forces, get Slackware





nitish_mythology said:


> Join the bright forces, get 'Zenwalk'....
> 
> _ Hope its not sounding like an advertisement  _



Join the bright forces, get FreeBSD.


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## debsuvra (Aug 1, 2008)

MetalheadGautham said:


> offtopic: kdemod4 is sooooo damn fast and sexy  but where is kde control center ?



hey there are KDEmod4 available ???? 

Why didn't you tell us ??? I am dying to try it since KDE4.1 has blown my mind in Ubuntu.


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## 4T7 (Aug 1, 2008)

mehulved said:


> Join the bright forces, get FreeBSD.


Already have it


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## mehulved (Aug 1, 2008)

debsuvra said:


> Why didn't you tell us ??? I am dying to try it since KDE4.1 has blown my mind in Ubuntu.


Filled-Void already did that in another thread. I have been using KDEmod 4.1 since then. The only reason I am using arch.


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## Faun (Aug 1, 2008)

migration...ahem...ahem !


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## shady_inc (Aug 1, 2008)

MetalheadGautham said:


> offtopic: kdemod4 is sooooo damn fast and sexy  but where is kde control center ?


In what way is it better than KDE 4.1.?


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## QwertyManiac (Aug 1, 2008)

KControlCenter is now System Settings (systemsettings)


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 2, 2008)

System Settings sucks. I wonder why they brought in that ugly app from Kubuntu.
I really miss KControlCenter.
And how can I switch to root mode for certain operations ?


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## aditya.shevade (Aug 2, 2008)

LOLOLOL... Use Pacific.au mirror.... It is fast.


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## mehulved (Aug 2, 2008)

For me, *mir.archlinux.fr is the fastest. Maybe it's cause I am on a different ISP.


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 2, 2008)

aditya.shevade said:


> LOLOLOL... Use Pacific.au mirror.... It is fast.





mehulved said:


> For me, *mir.archlinux.fr is the fastest. Maybe it's cause I am on a different ISP.


I will find out the truth tonight. 

Tonight is the night for some hectic downloading. I need to get CentOS 5.2 DVD ISO for testing purposes on my extra partition.

Along with that, I will download lots of software via pacman.


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## FilledVoid (Aug 3, 2008)

Did any of you actually try Powerpill?


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## gary4gar (Aug 3, 2008)

Yep, its fastest of the whole lot, but still not upto the mark. i get around 60kBps.
anyways, now i have a fully set up machine to i don't need to download much.

i am on KDE3.xx and if upgrade to KDE4.1. how much i have to download?


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## Faun (Aug 3, 2008)

gary4gar said:


> Yep, its fastest of the whole lot, but still not upto the mark. i get around 60kBps.
> anyways, now i have a fully set up machine to i don't need to download much.
> 
> i am on KDE3.xx and if upgrade to KDE4.1. how much i have to download?


*farm3.static.flickr.com/2134/2122604649_e2f8e1a9b0_o.png
just testing


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 3, 2008)

shady_inc said:


> In what way is it better than KDE 4.1.?


They compile their software using QT-Enhanced. This gives a fair bit of speed boost. And KDE4.1 recommends atleast 512MB RAM, but KDEmod runs like butter on my system.

*KDEmod 4.1 on My rig with Pentium 4 2.66GHz CPU, 256MB DDR RAM runs FASTER than Ubuntu 8.04 on similar rig with Pentium D 3.06GHz with HT Technology and again 256MB DDR RAM.*

So you get the idea of some speed difference ?


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## Faun (Aug 3, 2008)

MetalheadGautham said:


> They compile their software using QT-Enhanced. This gives a fair bit of speed boost. And KDE4.1 recommends atleast 512MB RAM, but KDEmod runs like butter on my system.
> 
> *KDEmod 4.1 on My rig with Pentium 4 2.66GHz CPU, 256MB DDR RAM runs FASTER than Ubuntu 8.04 on similar rig with Pentium D 3.06GHz with HT Technology and again 256MB DDR RAM.*
> 
> So you get the idea of some speed difference ?



thanks metaaaaaaaaal


*farm3.static.flickr.com/2018/2107306750_134e5f27e5_o.png*farm3.static.flickr.com/2374/2106525027_ff8776f98d_o.png


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 3, 2008)

I am trying out Powerpill now.


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## kalpik (Aug 3, 2008)

^^ About 300 MB.



T159 said:


> thanks metaaaaaaaaal
> 
> 
> *farm3.static.flickr.com/2018/2107306750_134e5f27e5_o.png*farm3.static.flickr.com/2374/2106525027_ff8776f98d_o.png


Banned for 2 days.


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 3, 2008)

Powerpill upped my 15kbps download speed to 53kbps. I guess this means I get to keep Arch. 

@Kalpik: Its me who T159 targeted that comment against, not anyone else. I am sure he meant it in a light hearted way. Since today is Friendship Day, I don't want to see this thing happen. Kindly unban him and give him a second chance.


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## FilledVoid (Aug 3, 2008)

Powerpill should increase the speeds you get. Technically its not increasing the speeds if I recall right its just utilizing your connection better.


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 3, 2008)

FilledVoid said:


> Powerpill should increase the speeds you get. Technically its not increasing the speeds if I recall right its just utilizing your connection better.


technically it just downloads from more than one mirror at a time. just the way I like it.

*Metalink FTW!*


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## gary4gar (Aug 3, 2008)

KDEmod seems better with i686, than 64bit.

is that true?


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 3, 2008)

gary4gar said:


> KDEmod seems better with i686, than 64bit.
> 
> is that true?


Because Arch was always an i686 centric OS. x86_64 development is quite active, but the more active arch veteran developers are mostly i686 guys, atleast, thats what their forum indicates. (see user profile, wiki and joined date of most devels). As for i586, well, thats the most half hearted approach I have seen. And a BIG waste of time.


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## Dark Star (Aug 3, 2008)

Please post SS of KDE 4.1 Mod.. Also just a suggestion Dream Linux not the best but oly uses 160 Mb even with full compiz on


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## gary4gar (Aug 4, 2008)

SS??


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## Pat (Aug 4, 2008)

He means ScreenShots.


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 4, 2008)

KDEmod 4.1 looks just like KDE 4.1. They haven't changed anything (yet) in appearence.


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## mehulved (Aug 4, 2008)

Dark Star said:


> Please post SS of KDE 4.1 Mod.. Also just a suggestion Dream Linux not the best but oly uses 160 Mb even with full compiz on


*www.thinkdigit.com/forum/showpost.php?p=902364&postcount=1296


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## MetalheadGautham (Aug 4, 2008)

Any idea whats the speed of KDEmod 4 compared to Gnome ?


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