# pkg upgrade slow



## stratacast1 (Mar 6, 2021)

Right now I'm in Kenya and having a really hard time getting a reliable download speed with pkg (only). I'm getting a pretty reliable 15Mbps right now and I can do a lot such as stream, download Ubuntu updates from the VM on my laptop, and everything else. I've tried manually setting geo mirrors, trying South Africa, Netherlands, and New York. No difference. I'm getting ~20kbps. I thought maybe I was being throttled for This traffic in particular, so I tried connecting to my Wireguard VPN in Texas and there's no difference. Same speeds. But I can still do everything else no problem. I'm doing networking over WiFi right now on FreeBSD 12.2. Thoughts on what I can change? Maybe I'm just out of luck even.


----------



## the3ajm (Mar 6, 2021)

When did it start happening or you've been always stuck to put up with this? We want to see if it the speed is normal before there was any changes.


----------



## zirias@ (Mar 6, 2021)

I've seen this complaint here in samewhat regular intervals by different users, which could indicate there *is* something fishy with at least some pkg mirrors. But then, all you could do on your end is to continue looking for a mirror that gives you sane speed


----------



## ShelLuser (Mar 6, 2021)

It might not have to be the mirror itself though... Don't forget that such a connection isn't a one on one between client and server, there will be tons of different routers in between and any of those could be responsible as well.

And unfortunately there doesn't even have to be any logic behind such hops. I've experienced something like this a few years ago when the connection to one of my favorite Minecraft servers got cut off for several hours per day. I couldn't access it from my home location but relaying over a VPN through another Dutch connection worked like a charm.

Turned out that a specific router was having issues, and only specific parts of the Netherlands were affected by it. This makes it very difficult to get to the bottom of such issues.


----------



## a6h (Mar 7, 2021)

Just a kludge: use a VPN. It often works me (*)
(*) _In my case it's a kb/s --> Mb/s converter!_


----------



## stratacast1 (Mar 9, 2021)

I've been trying all these different things with no luck  I have to go to another location yet to find if it is explicitly my network. I thought if it was my network then the VPN would solve my issues, but no help. Perhaps there is just something wrong with my network overall. Even though a lot of other services may be reliable, that doesn't mean all of them will be. What blew my head up earlier today was I was able to upload 50 photos/videos to my home in the US really fast, where in the past it was so awful that I gave up


----------



## SirDice (Mar 9, 2021)

stratacast1 said:


> Perhaps there is just something wrong with my network overall.


Don't rule out upstream issues. Internet on the African continent can be quite dodgy. It's normal for certain regions to go offline, apparently it's quite common for copper connection lines to get ripped out of the ground and sold as scrap by locals. At least that's been my experience doing network management for a large international oil company. We regularly had bits and pieces of our network in Africa go offline for no apparent reason.


----------



## stratacast1 (Mar 10, 2021)

SirDice said:


> Don't rule out upstream issues. Internet on the African continent can be quite dodgy. It's normal for certain regions to go offline, apparently it's quite common for copper connection lines to get ripped out of the ground and sold as scrap by locals. At least that's been my experience doing network management for a large international oil company. We regularly had bits and pieces of our network in Africa go offline for no apparent reason.


Funny! Yeah I think you're right. This is my first time taking a FreeBSD computer out here to Kenya. Normally it's Linux and macOS. And I'm finding now that there are other things that are sometimes bad, sometimes good. For example, I uploaded my photos to my Nextcloud server in the US no problem. But simply loading the Files app page on my Nextcloud server? Takes forever. I know at certain times of the day it is worse too. Maybe on this upcoming night when I sleep I'll try my pkg upgrade again. I haven't turned my laptop on in a few weeks so I have 1GB of updates...could take days at this rate lol. I may have to do selective updates. But even getting the packagesite takes about 10 minutes or more. I hope some day soon Kenya will start to improve on the networking side. Every time I come here I see them laying new fiber in places


----------



## stratacast1 (Mar 11, 2021)

Can confirm now that this is an issue local to Kenya. I'm on some pretty good public wifi and I'm still unable to crack about 30kBps doing pkg updates. It seems if there was ever a solution, it would be for FreeBSD to put a mirror in Kenya perhaps, and that's probably not a viable option. If I was here longer term I'd probably set up a dedicated box to serve packages on my local network. I'll just have to do without updates for a month  Sadly I have 1GB of updates and there isn't a way that I'll get that done in time unless I let my computer run for 1-2 days just updating


----------



## grahamperrin@ (Apr 18, 2021)

stratacast1 said:


> Right now I'm in Kenya …





stratacast1 said:


> Can confirm now that this is an issue local to Kenya. …





tux2bsd said:


> … mirrors (incl pkg) are also very slow in NZ.
> 
> … Downloads freebsd-update/pkg generally maxes at ~300KB/s for download, but most often at ~120KB/s.



Mine peaks at around 10 MB/s where the speed to my router is measured at 80 Mbps. Not slow enough to bother me. I understand that there's more to this than the speed to my router.






For a long time I was bothered by (but didn't complain about) things in general being much slower – typically much less than 1 MB/s. Eventually I realised that I was limited by FreeBSD support for Wi-Fi.


----------



## tux2bsd (Apr 19, 2021)

grahamperrin said:


> I was limited by FreeBSD support for Wi-Fi.


Interesting but I have done wifi file transfer (e.g. scp) at much higher speeds from that FreeBSD machine.


grahamperrin said:


> was bothered by (but didn't complain about)


How else will it be known? (p.s. doesn't have to be a whinge)


----------



## grahamperrin@ (Apr 20, 2021)

Thanks,



tux2bsd said:


> How else will it be known? (p.s. doesn't have to be a whinge)



For most of the time that I was bothered, I assumed that the problem was local (maybe within my household) and/or transient. In the absence of other people complaining, I most often assumed that it was local. I wasn't hugely bothered, and I could have complained, but it would have been a complaint-to-self


----------

