Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Karsten Behrmann <BearPerson AT gmx.net>]

Howdy all!
a few days ago some of us talked about the current netselect.
The following problems came up:

(1) It does not make sense to ping around for half a minute for a file
that takes 5 secs to download
(2) It often directs you to a server that does not have all sources

Problem (2) should be rather solved as we try all servers anyway now
I came up with the idea of adding a IS_LARGE hint in DETAILS for each
spell, which was discarded as it adds another variable to spells, which
might not be really a good idea.
Another idea migth be to get the filesize of the file in
/var/spool/sorcery that is probably the old version of the new file.
However, the main problem is that netselect is rather slow, so let's
adress that:
I thought we might put up private stats for each server, so you know
what server used to be fast, so it might be still fast.
So to make myself clear, I mean we might get the system time before the
download, after the download and the file size, so compute a rough
approximation of the download rate. Then we might save this value in
/var/state/servers (or in /etc, or whatever), so you don't need to ping
all servers, you just have to look up which was the fastest, and use it.
Of course, we need good starting values for the servers, but it would be
a method to select the fastest server without pinging very long.
Also, we should check all sourceforge etc. mirrors then, not just the
one the user selected.
Another advantage of these stats would be that one can save the
reliability of the server as well (how many of the files requested were
actually found on the server)

So, any suggestions, comments or anything?
So Far,
  Karsten Behrmann