[arch-general] What happened to Powerpill?

[Brendan Long]

On 03/28/2011 03:43 AM, Cédric Girard wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Oon-Ee Ng <ngoonee.talk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If you have 10 files to download, powerpill allows for 1 file from
>> mirror A, another from mirror B, and chunks of that large 68MB file
>> from mirrors C, D, and E at the same time.
>>
>> With the other solutions, you'd still wait for file 1 to finish
>> downloading before downloading file 2.
>>
> I understand this as being more flexible. But bandwith-wise, I do not see
> why the Powerpill solution is more efficient.
> Or maybe this come useful only when downloading small files where file
> content transfert itself is negligible compared to connection opening and
> other protocol handling...
>
For me the benefit came in two parts:

    * When you download a bunch of small files, most of your "download
      time" is actually just starting connections. Powerpill starts a
      bunch of connections at once so you can actually use your bandwidth.
    * A lot of Arch's mirrors are really slow. Powerpill lets you not
      worry about the speed of individual mirrors, because it's only
      their combined speed that matters.