Why yum's download speed is too slow

Question

My yum download speed in fedora is in average less than 5KB/s and goes to less than 1KB/s but my normal download speed is around 140KB/s. I tried installing yum-fastestmirrors but didn't help.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

At the end of the day yum is just a glorfied http downloader, so you can determine the actual URL that it's using to download a package and attempt to do the same using curl or wget and see if the slowness is being induced by the mirror site or something else local to your system.

You can use the repoquery to see the URL of one of the RPM packages like so:

$ repoquery --location kernel
http://kdeforge2.unl.edu/mirrors/fedora-archive/fedora/linux/updates/14/x86_64/kernel-2.6.35.14-106.fc14.x86_64.rpm

So you could use curl to analyze the download like so:

$ curl -O http://kdeforge2.unl.edu/mirrors/fedora-archive/fedora/linux/updates/14/x86_64/kernel-2.6.35.14-106.fc14.x86_64.rpm
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 21.9M  100 21.9M    0     0  2717k      0  0:00:08  0:00:08 --:--:-- 3054k

fastestmirror

Yum makes use of plugins to enhance it's features. One of these plugins is called fastestmirror. Sometimes this plugin can be the cause of slowness. The mirror sites that this plugin selects can sometimes not be the best ones to use all the time.

You can remove the preferred list of mirrors from this plugin by deleting this file:

$ sudo rm /var/cache/yum/timedhosts.txt

Also you can temporarily disable the fastestmirror plugin with this command:

$ sudo yum --disableplugin=fastestmirror install <package>

Answer 2

I've installed Yum Fast Downloader plugin and the download speed is now good.

Answer 3

If you get anything near the latest yum, it will now download from multiple urls at once ... and has drpm downloads/regeneration built in.

Older releases have rebuilds from the latest in rawhide here:

http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/james/yum-rawhide/

...or you can rebuild that locally, if you can't use anything from there.