[arch-general] What happened to Powerpill?

[Isaac Dupree]

On 04/04/11 00:00, Brendan Long wrote:
> 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.

I found both of these are heavily mirror-dependent (and occasionally a 
given mirror changes to be worse or better than it used to be).  It's 
dramatic enough that it feels like "some have problems, and some don't". 
  I've got a good mirrorlist currently... check 
https://www.archlinux.de/?page=MirrorStatus , and I think there was a 
command-line tool... also the kernel.org one likely works well 
everywhere (?) so if overwhelmed by the options could check if that 
changes anything - http://mirrors.kernel.org/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch

-Isaac