[tex-live] problems with tl2016 pretest

[Jim Diamond]

Thanks to everyone who responded.

On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 16:24 (+0200), Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> On 12 May 2016 at 14:53, Jim Diamond wrote:

>> (3) The download speed is very slow.  I don't know if
>> ftp.math.utah.edu throttles its connections or is just very busy,
>> or something else makes the installation happen very slowly.
>> But in any case, things are slow.  (I'm not complaining, just
>> observing and reporting!)

> You could check if using one of the European mirrors helps.
Thanks.  That is possible further away, but you never know.

I am now nearing the end of my current attempt, so if I am lucky I
won't need to try.

> You could also try to fetch the files with rsync first and then
> install from the tarballs on the filesystem.
True.  (But in the interest in contributing to "test the system before
it goes live" I'm betting most "users" will use tl-install.)



On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 08:39 (-0600), Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:

> Jim Diamond <Jim.Diamond at acadiau.ca> asks on Thu, 12 May 2016 09:53:23 -0300

>>> The download speed is very slow.  I don't know if
>>> ftp.math.utah.edu throttles its connections or is just very busy,

> No, we do not throttle connections, and our uplink should be quite
> fast.  If you can run

> 	traceroute www.math.utah.edu

> from your system, that should tell you how many router hops it takes,
> and which ones are the bandwidth bottlenecks.

25 hops.  No obvious bottlenecks, at least as far as I can see from
the RTTs.

> I just made a test from a guest account that I have at another
> university in the state of California:

> 	wget http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive/bin/i386-freebsd-9.1.tar.xz
> 	...
> 	100%[======================================>] 35,882,840  29.1MB/s   in 1.2s   


> 	wget ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive/bin/i386-freebsd-9.1.tar.xz
> 	...
> 	100%[======================================>] 35,882,840  33.7MB/s   in 1.0s

Woof!  I'm working from home today, but I just tried from my
university, which has both a good commercial connection and a fast
research net connection (CA*net, similar to Internet2 in the US and
other high-performance networks in other places).

It took 64 seconds to d/l that (http) from my university.  And there
are only 17 hops there, and traceroute shows that the connection is
via CA*net to internet2.

I tried ftp from work and this time got 49 seconds.  Better, and yet
not very good.


> From my home system (Comcast cable-modem connection), just 5km south
> of my office on campus, I got transfer rates of 0.717MB/s and
> 0.419MB/s, about 50 to 100 times slower than the inter-state
> inter-university download.  That is just a reflection of the poor
> Internet service speeds that we have to put up with at homes in Salt
> Lake City from our only two major providers: cable and telephone DSL.
> Most local users report higher bandwidth from cable than from DSL.
Well, I will be near the last in line to defend my ISP, but while they
are not great, nor are they terrible.  I just tried again with ftp,
and this time got
100%[======================================>] 35,882,840  1.07MB/s   in 41s    

> Google Fiber is coming to our city, but deployment has not yet
> reached my neighborhood, and I pay $90/month for my current service.
I have fiber to my home, but that just means the slowdown isn't in my
house :-)



Certainly the wget was much faster than tl-install picking up the
individual packages.

So maybe my question should have been:

Q: why is install-tl making such limited use of my bandwidth?

Looking at a program I use to monitor things on my machine (procmeter3),
I see that when I was grabbing the files with wget (both http and ftp)
I was getting way more data/second than when tl-install was running.

Looking at the tl-install log, I see things like this:
Installing [3215/3246, time/total: 03:24:55/03:25:49]: xypic-tut-pt [221k]
Installing [3216/3246, time/total: 03:24:58/03:25:51]: xytree [229k]
Installing [3217/3246, time/total: 03:25:01/03:25:53]: yafoot [266k]
Installing [3218/3246, time/total: 03:25:06/03:25:56]: yagusylo [1665k]
Installing [3219/3246, time/total: 03:25:11/03:25:51]: yannisgr [65k]
so there are "large" times between downloads.  Perhaps tl-install is
taking coffee breaks between each package.  (I am using a laptop with
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2760QM CPU @ 2.40GHz, 8 GB RAM, and a fast disk
(as spinny disks go).  Not super top of the line, but not an 80386
either.)

Oh well... at least this time I got pdftex.  :-)


Cheers.
                                Jim