Suggestion: Run reflector before install

The default mirrors (at least for me) are painfully slow. I've been getting around this by just manually running reflector before opening the installer. Running reflector on the latest 25 mirrors should just be a default Behavior before running installation to make sure it's running at a decent speed
13 Replies
Asterisk
Asterisk2mo ago
the mirror can be changed from system.yaml the default is https://geo.mirror.pkgbuild.com which should point to your closest mirror
LordKitsuna
LordKitsunaOP2mo ago
Closest != fastest is the problem. These are file downloads we don't care about latency. A lot of other distributions will run reflector before they start the install process for exactly that reason
Asterisk
Asterisk2mo ago
arch-repo: 'your-repo-url-here'
arch-repo: 'your-repo-url-here'
LordKitsuna
LordKitsunaOP2mo ago
I'm aware that it can be changed manually I'm just suggesting that it should be done automatically before the system is installed, pretty typical on a lot of distributions these days
Asterisk
Asterisk2mo ago
yes we figured this would work for most but I suppose no? after updates the edited mirrorlist would go away so you'd have to run reflector each update
LordKitsuna
LordKitsunaOP2mo ago
At least not for me, I've been installing it quite a bit recently as I'm testing if I want to deploy these at work so I've been installing it on a lot of different networks and when I forget to manually run reflector I always end up with a painfully slow download Yeah that's what I've been doing, but it really should just be integrated as part of the install/update process which is why I tagged both install and update
Asterisk
Asterisk2mo ago
noted, if you want you can make this an akshara issue
LordKitsuna
LordKitsunaOP2mo ago
I'll try to make a suggestion ticket when I can:AFoxy_Noted:
autumn (CIPG)
autumn (CIPG)5w ago
hold on, so what's the issue? doesn't akshara already run reflector? the installer (well, the part that doesn't use akshara) doesn't though, i think
LordKitsuna
LordKitsunaOP5w ago
Yeah I've been digging and it seems it does. I'm still trying to find where in its files to figure out exactly what command is using because it's doing horrifically My updates average 200k speeds and I'm on 200Mbps fiber lol I know from my plain arch install there are multiple mirrors able to max my bandwidth It's hard to tell what it's actually doing because when we looked at whether or not it was using parallel it looks like it should be but it's not The code has
with open('/.new_rootfs/etc/pacman.conf', 'w') as modified: modified.write(data.replace("[options]", "[options]\nParallelDownloads = 32\n"))
with open('/.new_rootfs/etc/pacman.conf', 'w') as modified: modified.write(data.replace("[options]", "[options]\nParallelDownloads = 32\n"))
But updates do not use parallel downloads, i also see what looks like reflector
exec_chroot('reflector', '--latest', '5', '--protocol', 'https', '--sort', 'rate', '--save', '/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist')
exec_chroot('reflector', '--latest', '5', '--protocol', 'https', '--sort', 'rate', '--save', '/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist')
But since the parallel command doesn't actually apply to updates i can't be sure this is the exact string reflector is using If it is though it should really be latest 25. I have found that's enough to pretty much guarantee you can get one able to utilize your bandwidth. 5 isn't enough to ensure that in my experience
autumn (CIPG)
autumn (CIPG)5w ago
alright, i'll take a look to be clear, is this for initial installation, or updates?
LordKitsuna
LordKitsunaOP5w ago
Both need it ideally, I've had even worse speeds on initial installation sometimes sub 100k But updates go pretty slowly too Figuring out why parallel downloads is not being used even though it's in the configuration would definitely help as well as increasing the amount of mirrors tested

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