Actively monitor mirror quality, and remove bad mirrors from the list

[Vadim]

I've noticed that low quality mirrors are annoyingly common in Ubuntu. By low quality I mean:

* Mirrors that aren't anymore and return a 404
* Mirrors that offer very low download speeds, such as 50KB/s, when many users have connections capable of much higher speeds
* Mirrors that fail often, by for instance timing out.

For instance, from the mirrors available for Spain:
ftp.dat.etsit.upm.es worked an hour ago but now times out
sunsite.rediris.es is slow, getting speeds from 50KB/s to a max of 150KB/s or so.

My suggestions:

* Mirrors should be actively policed, and checked for availability, performance, and being up to date. Mirrors that don't perform well enough should be removed.
* Mirror lists should be periodically refreshed by package management tools, since an user who uses a now failed mirror would have a hard time downloading an updated package that contains a new list.
* Package management tools should automatically offer a good mirror to use, by testing the mirrors for the user's country for latency and bandwidth and selecting the best one.

[David Barnett (mu-mind)]

It would be great to at least get the freshness data from https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors into software-properties-gtk and other mirror choosing tools. Has that been proposed before?

I've been using ubuntu.secs.oakland.edu for months oblivious to the fact that it's very, very out of date. When I finally discovered and switched mirrors, I had 317 packages to be upgraded.