mirror ca.archive.ubuntu.com slow - possibly throttled at 20-30k/sec

[Thomas Meixner]

The Canadian ubuntu mirror at ca.archive.ubuntu.com is very slow. It appears to be throttled at around 20-30k/sec around the clock without exception since a majority of users in the #ubuntu-ca channel reported the same issue.

Since after setting the timezone to a Canadian City ubuntu automatically defaults to the Canadian mirror, especially new users who don't know how to change the repository have to wait for hours for their first update to finish downloading. Already a simple "apt-get update" takes several minutes. Amongst seasoned Canadian Ubuntu users it seems to be common to change manually to the main server to avoid these slow download speeds.

It would be desirable if Canadian users per default would experience a download speed which allows them to update their system in a timely manner.

[Don Zavitz (dzavitz)]

CONFIRMED... living here in Calgary, AB and having the mirror on the other side of the country in ON, i always thought this was me, but a few of us (including Mr. Meixner) did some testing and it seems that no matter where in Canada you are, your not getting more than 30k/sec from the mirror. This needs to be dealt with. This is unacceptable as Mr. Meixner said above, a new user who doesn't know any better, or doesn't know how, or even the fact that he can, to change his sources.list to the main server (archive.ubuntu.com)

On every install of Ubuntu that I have done, I quickly do an apt-get update and if I see its taking forever, cancel the update and edit my sources.list....what's the point of having this mirror if its throttled to 30k/sec all the time? Pointless

Maybe a quick fix for this might be to default all Canadian users to the main server for now...and maybe some of mirror maintainers can work on resolving this with the University of Waterloo (ca.archive.ubuntu.com) or maybe another mirror somewhere else in the country needs to be setup.

[Thomas Meixner (tom-meixner)]

Just some more info:

The university of Waterloo is the only Canadian mirror with a 1Gpbs Connection.

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors

Their network load can be seen in the following graphs.

https://strobe.uwaterloo.ca/~twiki/bin/view/ISTNS/ExternalNetworkStats

[Andrew Glen-Young (aglenyoung)]

I have informed the mirror admin of the issue and they are currently looking into the problem. I have modified DNS in the meantime.