On Tue, 6 Jan 1998, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: > I would be very interested in hearing your experiances with using HTTP for > downloading .debs and the Packages file. I was hoping to use it as the > prefered method with deity. >
Not much experience yet, as the code is less than a day old and there are no HTTP accessible mirrors yet (prod prod). I just downloaded some files from nonus.debian.org through the cache at high speed, so they do cache locally, even when the source is ftp. HTTP should cache more reliably (using If-Modified-Since GETs) rather than the heuristics of an ftp cache. HTTP/1.0 doesn't support partial retrieves (unlike ftp which can continue an interrupted download), but HTTP/1.1 does. I suspect we'll get better cache hit rates if everyone in Australia [the world?] uses the same sites (ftp.debian.org.au and nonus.debian.org), rather than everyone picking a nearby site. This way the caches will be more likely to hold a local copy. Most universities here are in the same cache heirachy - so using common remote URL's will be cheaper than using dispersed interstate URLs. I don't think the smaller ISP's are as organized (judging by their volume limits), but the larger ones may be. More sophisticated hashing (HTTP/1.1?) in the caches might make this all irrelevant. -Drake -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
