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Cloudflare Package Repository Mirrors

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Re: Cloudflare Package Repository Mirrors

#11

Post by overflow_error »

How is this supposed to work? (I use Arch BTW) supposed I'm in a country X, does Cloudflare basically caching the request to server that are in country X? But I'm already close to that server and I'm always cautious with mirrors that are in country X, often they were out of date :(

Re: Cloudflare Package Repository Mirrors

#12

Post by the8472 »

james412 wrote: post #5

As much as I'd love to use CloudFlare's uniformly fast network for package update, I'd never use this simply because I already depend on them for too much stuff. It's not like letting them gather logs on my computers updating would be terrible somehow, but if it's so easy to avoid donating more logs and more dependence on them, why not do it for the sake of preserving diversity? Growing companies often exhibit a long…

Companies sponsoring free mirrors has a long history without anything going wrong though. The key is to keep using mirror lists, not a mirror. Anyone who tries to "differentiate" should be removed from those lists. The difference with their DNS and CDN services is that all the information gets funneled through them instead of being one of many used in a round-robin manner.

Re: Cloudflare Package Repository Mirrors

#14

Post by lsofzz »

overflow_error wrote: post #11

How is this supposed to work? (I use Arch BTW) supposed I'm in a country X, does Cloudflare basically caching the request to server that are in country X? But I'm already close to that server and I'm always cautious with mirrors that are in country X, often they were out of date :(

> How is this supposed to work? (I use Arch BTW) supposed I'm in a country X, does Cloudflare basically caching the request to server that are in country X? But I'm already close to that server and I'm always cautious with mirrors that are in country X, often they were out of date :(

According to what I read in their main page https://cloudflaremirrors.com/archlinux, they seem to be caching the packages from mirrors and serving it via their anycast network.

Re: Cloudflare Package Repository Mirrors

#15

Post by gravitas »

overflow_error wrote: post #11

How is this supposed to work? (I use Arch BTW) supposed I'm in a country X, does Cloudflare basically caching the request to server that are in country X? But I'm already close to that server and I'm always cautious with mirrors that are in country X, often they were out of date :(

This is my issue with it as well - it's basically their geo-sniffing magic routing you towards the closest officially listed mirrors for that country (glorified proxy); it makes the mistake of presuming that all those mirrors listed in the Arch country-mirrorlist are created equal in terms of reliability and performance, but they're not (we have a whole web page just to track out of date mirrors).

Re: Cloudflare Package Repository Mirrors

#16

Post by capableweb »

gravitas wrote: post #15
overflow_error wrote: post #11

How is this supposed to work? (I use Arch BTW) supposed I'm in a country X, does Cloudflare basically caching the request to server that are in country X? But I'm already close to that server and I'm always cautious with mirrors that are in country X, often they were out of date :(

This is my issue with it as well - it's basically their geo-sniffing magic routing you towards the closest officially listed mirrors for that country (glorified proxy); it makes the mistake of presuming that all those mirrors listed in the Arch country-mirrorlist are created equal in terms of reliability and performance, but they're not (we have a whole web page just to track out of date mirrors).

"geo-sniffing magic routing", Also known as BGP + CloudFlare Argo (https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/performance/routing-vs-s...)

Re: Cloudflare Package Repository Mirrors

#17

Post by Havoc »

gravitas wrote: post #15
overflow_error wrote: post #11

How is this supposed to work? (I use Arch BTW) supposed I'm in a country X, does Cloudflare basically caching the request to server that are in country X? But I'm already close to that server and I'm always cautious with mirrors that are in country X, often they were out of date :(

This is my issue with it as well - it's basically their geo-sniffing magic routing you towards the closest officially listed mirrors for that country (glorified proxy); it makes the mistake of presuming that all those mirrors listed in the Arch country-mirrorlist are created equal in terms of reliability and performance, but they're not (we have a whole web page just to track out of date mirrors).

Yeah Arch mirrors in particular seem all over the place on quality. In true Arch spirit you def want to configure that yourself

Re: Cloudflare Package Repository Mirrors

#19

Post by syshum »

james412 wrote: post #5

As much as I'd love to use CloudFlare's uniformly fast network for package update, I'd never use this simply because I already depend on them for too much stuff. It's not like letting them gather logs on my computers updating would be terrible somehow, but if it's so easy to avoid donating more logs and more dependence on them, why not do it for the sake of preserving diversity? Growing companies often exhibit a long…

>>>It's hard to imagine CloudFlare are somehow going to monopolize package management :)

10 years ago it would have been hard to imagine that Microsoft would own the largest open source code repository in the world.... but here we are.

I do not find it hard to image CloudFlare eating Package Management at all

Re: Cloudflare Package Repository Mirrors

#20

Post by Pirate-of-SV »

I ran rankmirrors (from pacman-contrib) on the mirror and the 5 upstream i got on https://cloudflaremirrors.com/archlinux

rankmirrors test the time to download core.db from each mirror. Basically this:

  curl -s -m 1 -w "%{time_total} %{http_code}" -o/dev/null https://cloudflaremirrors.com/archlinux/core/os/x86_64/core.db.tar.gz
The results vary a lot sometimes cloudflare mirrors is the fastest, sometimes it's the slowest. Getting anything between 0.07 and 0.30

  $ rankmirrors -t ./ml
  Querying servers. This may take some time...
     *   *   *   *   *   *
   Servers sorted by time (seconds):
  https://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.113249
  https://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.120371
  https://mirror.osbeck.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.127601
  https://archlinux.dynamict.se/$repo/os/$arch : 0.180493
  https://ftp.myrveln.se/pub/linux/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.248406
  https://cloudflaremirrors.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.302824
  
  $ rankmirrors -t ./ml
  Querying servers. This may take some time...
     *   *   *   *   *   *
   Servers sorted by time (seconds):
  https://cloudflaremirrors.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.070069
  https://mirror.osbeck.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.081506
  https://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.098763
  https://archlinux.dynamict.se/$repo/os/$arch : 0.125846
  https://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.127948
  https://ftp.myrveln.se/pub/linux/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.136529
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