Slow download from ubuntu.com servers

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

First, sorry, I haven't the faintest clue on where to file this issues on the ubuntu.com servers, so here goes...

I have been seeing some erratic behavior from the ubuntu.com servers for some time now when I am downloading files from the domain (~1 month, maybe more). Firstly when I start the download it screams down at a whopping > 6MB/s, this goes for the first ~100MB and then drops slowly down to ~6 KB/s within a few minutes.

For a concrete example I am seeing this just now with: http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-moblin-remix/daily-live/20090914/karmic-moblin-remix-i386.iso

I probably wouldn't have reported this if it wasn't because I mentioned it to some of the other guys at the office and they had also experienced the exact same symptoms for some time now, making me believe that I am probably not out on a limb.

Otherwise my network connection is rock solid and generally very fast

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup)]

I am attaching the output of 'mtr cdimages.ubuntu.com' in case it matters...

[David R. Hedges (p14nd4)]

I downloaded the karmic cdimage today, and saw similar behavior ... would fluctuate between ~300 KiB/s and 380 B/s.

tracert cdimages.ubuntu.com from right now (sorry, didn't think to check when I downloaded):
[...]
  4 21 ms 21 ms 18 ms 144.232.250.221
  5 19 ms 18 ms 22 ms sl-crs2-chi-0-4-0-3.sprintlink.net [144.232.10.19]
  6 44 ms 49 ms 43 ms sl-crs2-nyc-0-12-0-3.sprintlink.net [144.232.20.163]
  7 110 ms 110 ms 105 ms sl-bb20-lon-4-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.9.165]
  8 111 ms 111 ms 110 ms sl-bb23-lon-3-0.sprintlink.net [213.206.129.151]
  9 111 ms 111 ms 111 ms sl-gw23-lon-15-0.sprintlink.net [213.206.128.63]
 10 107 ms 106 ms 109 ms 89.191.196.130
 11 112 ms 107 ms 111 ms canonical-gw.datahop.net [195.72.130.230]
 12 107 ms 117 ms 107 ms beryllium.canonical.com [91.189.88.34]

[Luke Faraone (lfaraone)]

This isn't really a bug in Ubuntu, rather, it is a known problem of the internet: servers have finite bandwidth. The best solution would be to use a local mirror.

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup)]

No need to be condescending Luke, I have indeed heard of this here "internet" before ;-)

How did you deduct that it is a bandwidth issue, and not a local IO issue on the Canonical servers?

[Luke Faraone (lfaraone)]

Apologies, that was not my intent.

Anyway, the best place to discuss infrastructure issues is via IRC at #canonical-sysadmin, escalating to a rt ticket if needed. <email address hidden> is the email address for that specific RT issue queue, I believe.