Today I did some digging with wget and discovered what actually is wrong, at least true in my case. It turned out that problem with horribbly slow download happens only when virtualbox binary is pulled directly from download.virtualbox.org server that is when you use virtualbox's official repo, probably because all users are hammering that same one server. But if you download the same virtualbox binary from download page, you'd be redirectly to CDN mirrors and the file will be served from those servers instead which gives you significanly better download speed.
Code: Select all
% wget -O /dev/null http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/pool/contrib/v/virtualbox-4.3/virtualbox-4.3_4.3.26-98988%7eUbuntu%7eraring_i386.deb
--2015-03-17 21:07:06-- http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/pool/contrib/v/virtualbox-4.3/virtualbox-4.3_4.3.26-98988%7eUbuntu%7eraring_i386.deb
Resolving download.virtualbox.org (download.virtualbox.org)... 137.254.120.26
Connecting to download.virtualbox.org (download.virtualbox.org)|137.254.120.26|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 64931648 (62M) [application/x-debian-package]
Saving to: ‘/dev/null’
1% [> ] 752,702 --.-K/s eta 90m 5s ^C
% wget -O /dev/null http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.26/virtualbox-4.3_4.3.26-98988\~Ubuntu\~raring_i386.deb
--2015-03-17 21:08:20-- http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.26/virtualbox-4.3_4.3.26-98988~Ubuntu~raring_i386.deb
Resolving download.virtualbox.org (download.virtualbox.org)... 137.254.120.26
Connecting to download.virtualbox.org (download.virtualbox.org)|137.254.120.26|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Moved Temporarily
Location: http://dlc-cdn.sun.com/virtualbox/4.3.26/virtualbox-4.3_4.3.26-98988~Ubuntu~raring_i386.deb [following]
--2015-03-17 21:08:21-- http://dlc-cdn.sun.com/virtualbox/4.3.26/virtualbox-4.3_4.3.26-98988~Ubuntu~raring_i386.deb
Resolving dlc-cdn.sun.com (dlc-cdn.sun.com)... 1.9.56.11, 1.9.56.19
Connecting to dlc-cdn.sun.com (dlc-cdn.sun.com)|1.9.56.11|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 64931648 (62M) [application/x-debian-package]
Saving to: ‘/dev/null’
100%[==================================================================================================================================================>] 64,931,648 521KB/s in 2m 20s
2015-03-17 21:10:42 (452 KB/s) - ‘/dev/null’ saved [64931648/64931648]
So this probably explains why users' download speed off the repo server eventually craps out so badly after it starts off pretty fast. I hope virtualbox.org sysadmin or somebody at Oracle will take notice of this and see if there's something could be done to fix this issue