To virtualbox.org server sysadmin: Please fix slow repo DL

[twochair]

I think this issue has been going on for quite a while now as evident by few topics which popped up every now and then regarding repo download speed being utter crap slow

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

[adrian_vg]

Cool! You got an hour and a half dl-time! Mine was about 400000 hrs before exiting with an error... >>8->

Anyway, I've seen this problem for the last couple of years with no improvment. If pressed I'd say this will not be fixed anytime soon.

A related question might be - why offer a repo at all if it works so bad as to be completely unusable?

Oracle? Any comments please?

[klaus]

We investigated this some months ago (prompted by a complaint on IRC), and it turns out that for some odd reason the deb/rpm repos are handled by download.virtualbox.org directly. This is handled by a server operated by Oracle which deals with a lot of traffic (also from other products) which usually redirects downloads to a content delivery network (greatly speeding up downloads by giving you a well-connected, geographically close download server). For some funky reason (we're just a "customer" of this service without admin access) this isn't happening for the repos. Personally I've never seen the unbearable performance some people are seeing (and I'm physically far away from it), but the reports are plausible. Trying to find out what can be done...

[adrian_vg]

Hi and thanks for the reply!

Good to hear you're working on it.
Looking forward to a fix!

[klaus]

Should be fixed effective immediately.

[michaln]

What Klaus meant to say was "please try again and report the results here"

[klaus]

Didn't I say that? For me the two statements are synonyms

[adrian_vg]

Thanks.

Will try it out as soon as a new version update is available!

[BluesFan44]

Hi,

I hope someone is still tracking this thread -- the download for Ubuntu 13.10 i386 VirtualBox VDI Virtual Appliance is running very slow again -- it sat for a couple of hours without getting past 7%.

Can you help please?

Thanks!

[Perryg]

Hi,

I hope someone is still tracking this thread -- the download for Ubuntu 13.10 i386 VirtualBox VDI Virtual Appliance is running very slow again -- it sat for a couple of hours without getting past 7%.

Can you help please?

Thanks!

Yes it is still being tracked, but can you tell us exactly what it is you are trying to download? The topic is about downloading VirtualBox and not an appliance of any kind.

[klaus]

Looks like this is a recurring issue (unfortunately outside our direct control) whenever we upload a new release. The latest report correlates with the release of 5.0.20. It's certainly not overload, it seems to be related to strange behavior of the CDN when updating repo information.

I bet if you try again today the issue will be gone again.

[frank]

I would like to know the exact link which you are trying to download which is slow.