Comment 17 for bug 140458

At the moment if a Spanish user cannot connect to one of the 2 mirrors there, has equal chances to be connected to releases.ubuntu.com or to a server in a developing country with 64K upload. By assigning equal weightings the users are worse off. Not just that, the developing country server is also worse off, since that gets allocated a share of downloads disproportional to what the server and/or country infrastructure can take.

So far ubuntu mirrors list has been perused mostly by human beings, that can easily adjusts for the lack of information in there, but metalinks are supposed to be read by machines and a bit more guidance is in order. All I am asking, is to pick say 10 servers that you know are "good" (or at least not too bad) to be used as fallbacks... So that in the example above, the third attempt of the Spanish user will hit one of those 10 servers. If you want to get fancy and sample download data in multiple countries to bucket the servers, feel free, but it's not necessary.

I'd guess that assigning a high weighting to the bittorrent listings (for the clients that support it) would also make sense.