[tex-live] Choosing a mirror

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Tue Nov 24 01:02:38 CET 2009


On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Robin Fairbairns
<Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> When you say "run", Ken, should I infer "re-run", since 'tlmgr update
>> --list' seems to use just one mirror, selected at the beginning.  But
>> even if I re-run it, it chooses the same mirror :
>
> for a very long time, i there was only one choice for uk addresses, so
> if mirror.ctan.org had deduced that your address was here, you would
> have got cambridge.
>
> there are now 2 uk mirrors (you wait 10 years for a mirror, then two
> come along at pretty much at once), so you should in principal get
> rotation of addresses.
>
> note that i don't know (a) how mirror.ctan decides which country you're
> in, and (b) whether my deduction (from tenuous evidence) that it always
> goes for a mirror in your own country, if such exist.
>
> (a mirror in the same country isn't always a good model; at one stage my
> wife and i exchanged email via new york, even though we both had .uk
> addresses -- ny was the nearest peer between the two networks.)
>
> robin

It often helps to choose a mirror someplace where it is between midnight
and 8am, which suggests that the mirrors are busy during peak daytime
hours.  This also holds for redhat fedora, CRAN, and ubuntu.   Almost
everywhere seems to be a long way from here (more than a dozen hops).


-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia


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