On 01/30/2017 02:39 PM, Florian Pritz via arch-dev-public wrote:

I've just received a report from a mirror admin about some very heavy traffic. After some investigation it appears that the traffic towards his mirror started to rise around the beginning of the new year when we disabled the mirror checker on gerolde. Since we now only have a mirror checker running in Germany and his server is actually in the same data centre as ours, the mirror checks completed very quickly.

Archweb uses this data to calculate a "mirror score" which can be seen here[1]. This score can also be used to sort the mirror list that can be generate by archweb list this[2].

[1] https://www.archlinux.org/mirrors/status/ [2] https://www.archlinux.org/mirrorlist/?use_mirror_status=on&protocol=https

Apparently there is a script in AUR[3] which uses [2] to fetch a mirrorlist. That script runs once a day.

[3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/update-pacman-mirrorlist/

It seems to me that this AUR package is *generally* in bad taste, although granted, depending on people to do smart things is probably not a good idea either. No one needs to update their mirrors daily, but either way, rather than using horrendously inaccurate metrics I would suggest using rankmirrors or even reflector's "--fastest" option. From looking at the package, it seems to be its own source as well, which is actually against the rules.

I'm thinking about removing the mirror score from archweb's output and more importantly, not sorting mirrors based on this score but rather randomizing the list returned in [2]. It could still take the score into account by limiting the returned set to mirror that are not totally out of date, but I'd remove the sorting. The score doesn't really have a lot a meaning anyways since it's just from our point of view.

Does anyone have hard feeling about this? If not I'll prepare a patch in the next few days.

Sounds like it fits the intended use-case anyway. -- Eli Schwartz