Re: The 1-2-3's of HTTP

My rural broadband got upgraded to GPON six weeks ago, previously I had 36Mbps down, 12 up. So I've been distro-hopping, and while image downloads are fast enough, why is updating a distro no faster? GPON ramps up, and most distros use wget (nothing against wget) instead of curl. Large tarballs may ramp up GPON but most don't. So it's a tiny bit faster than before... what's up with that, I wondered?



The solution to this problem isn't 3, it's 1.1 pipelining vs. opening multiple connections for "parallel" performance. I need to rtfm for curl to see what -v really does. When I settle on a distro, my first change will be to the package manager, to use curl and force HTTP 1.1 pipelining over one connection. This is fastest for me what with GPON latency. A big knock against Windows is all the time spent updating and such, but the open-source world can, in some cases, be no better.



Downloading 1.5 GBs of updates for a fresh install, shouldn't take half an hour with gigabit FTTH. BTW, uploads on GPON, different story. Less latency and more bandwidth, than downloading.


-Eric