Comment 1 for bug 10856

just realized mirrorselect is a gentoo thing and you possibly never heard of it
:-) although the name is pretty much self-explanatory.

It's something that you optionally run during a Gentoo install. It traces the
latency to all Gentoo mirrors it knows about and finds which one is faster for
you. Sorry, I don't have an URL for it, but you can fetch the sources from a
Gentoo archive at foo/distfiles/mirrorselect-0.87.tbz2 (eg
http://planetmirror.com/pub/gentoo/distfiles/mirrorselect-0.87.tbz2)

There are certainly other tools that do the same job too...

And now as I write this I find this is already a Hoary goal :-D ah ok, now you
have a bug to point to...