[Dev] Requirements for an (European) mirror?

[Johannes Krampf]

2011/11/29 Michał Masłowski <mtjm at mtjm.eu>:
>> Thanks for your answer Michal. Do you think it would make sense to set
>> up a third mirror (in Europe)?
>>
>> I got the idea because there are only two mirrors in my mirrorlist and
>> I got "slow" downloads (1-2MB/s instead of 8 or 9) at my location in
>> Southern Switzerland.
>
> For me such downloads would be fast.  It's 1-2 MB/s for big packages
> like nexuiz-data?

I made a quick test using wget and got 7MB/s when downloading the
kernel from puzzle and 3MB/s from the parabola repo. The first value
was increasing whereas the second was slowing down from an initial
5MB/s.

Don't get me wrong - It's still very fast and absolutely no problem, I
was just surprised to see this speed after getting used to the fast
connection.

>> When I had a look at server prices, I found a reasonable 50€/month
>> offer [1] with 100MBit/s until 10TB transfer per month which I would
>> be willing to donate. But since I never worked with a downloading
>> server before, I have no idea what requirements a mirror has.
>
> I never administered a server with more than about 50 GiB of monthly
> transfer, a small VPS could be enough in such case (but it might have
> limited speed below 100 Mbps).
>
>> Nicolás: ifconfig will also show the transfered bytes since the last
>> reboot, this might help to get an rough estimate.
>
> It shows bytes transfered since the interface was configured, so it's
> probably an underestimate.  It shows 3.3 GiB of received packets and 3.2
> GiB of packets sent, while the server is running for 80 days.
>
>> [1] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4

OK, if these are indeed the correct values, I'm not sure if it makes
sense to get such a powerful server for a new mirror or if it makes
sense to get a further mirror _server_ at all.

A pay-as-you go model such as Amazon S3 or MS Azure CDN might be
interesting here. Mostly because I always wanted to work with such a
system, but also because it should provide the fastest downloads while
still being very inexpensive for such little data.

What do you think?