[pacman-dev] bug: pacman giving up too fast downloading

[Paul Dufresne]

Thank you Jonathan for your answer.

For now, uncommenting the xfercommand with curl almost totally fix the
issue (well, once I decided to stop it because I was waiting for about
2 mins with no result, much harder to stop that way, have to use kill
command rather than ^C), but after that it have gone well, I was able
to download about 12 files of about 500k each, where I had to go about
3 times to get a 350k files before.

It is not uncommon for the speed reported by curl to go to 0 for 20
seconds, then go as high as 25kB/sec for a short while, then going
down to the normal 4kB/s speed. (I know, for most people, 4kB is way
too slow, but that's what I expect). So, I suppose this is the
out-of-order effect of TCP going on... that is, while it seems to be
receiving nothing for the user-land, kernel is receiving packets, but
transmit them only to userland when the next packet is received. I
guess the 10 sec Timeout would not be so short, if it was really the
kernel not receiving the packets for that much time, and not the
user-space file not growing.

That said, I would have to recompile pacman with a modified timeout to
be sure it does really help... but I did not compile much if any
packages yet outside the AUR ones. Not sure if it is as simple as
makepkg.

2010/2/16, Jonathan Conder <j at skurvy.no-ip.org>:
> On Tue, 2010-02-16 at 09:25 -0500, Paul Dufresne wrote:
>> Well, I have lots of errors while downloading packages with pacman,
>> and almost never while downloading files from Shiretoko Firefox.
>>
>> I have tried many mirrors, that's the same for each.
>>
>> Oh... I use a 56k modem (Intel 536EP Data Fax modem).
>>
>> But even while downloading in Firefox, it sometimes give me the
>> feeling it has stopped downloading for about 40 secs... while pacman
>> seems to give up after about 20 secs.
>>
>> I did not tried yet to download with wget or curl (does pacman use one
>> of them?).
>>
>> Is there a constant I could change in the code, and rebuild it?... I
>> did not download the code of pacman yet.
>
> I am not a pacman developer, but I believe you can search for
> 'fetchTimeout' in pacman-3.3.3/lib/libalpm/dload.c and change it from 10
> to whatever you want. Alternatively, you could use XferCommand
> in /etc/pacman.conf with wget, curl, etc. Read the man page for details.
>
> Hope this helps
> Jonathan
>
>
>