I run Debian Unstable and upgrade using Synaptic. Over the past few months I have seen a degradation in ftp transfer speeds to the point where I only seem to be able to upgrade on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Speeds drop to near zero from about 100 kb/sec. This is on a nominal 2MB connection.

This morning I had the same behaviour using sources fom Italy, Germany and Ireland.

I then altered my source list to use http.

deb ftp://ftp.ie.debian.org/debian/ unstable contrib main non-free

became

deb http://ftp.ie.debian.org/debian/ unstable contrib main non-free

My download speed is now 300 - 500 Kb/s and not dropping.

My question is: Is it possible that I need to tweak something on my system or could my ISP be throttling ftp connections? If the latter, is there a way to find out short of asking?

If I ask and get a proper answer it will be a record-breaking first.

this really sounds like a bandwidth issue at the server end (the debian) mirrors.

This may not be a 'proper' answer, but i would suggest that the only way to test this is to try downloads from a number of FTP servers.

last night i tried to download Mepis 3.4.3 and it was going to take six hours. i switched to another ftp server and it was down in an hour.

The fact that it is faster at off peak times (e.g. the weekend) only illistrates my point. Also the fact that the speed has degradated over time, to my mind, indicates inscreasing load on the FTP servers in question.

Personally i am not aware of ISP interfereing with FTP traffic. In fact i am not sure this would be very feasible.

as i say, the fact that you can download at full speed from other mirrors pretty much destroys the ISP argument.

i dont believe you need to tweak anything. the only way to be sure is to try a large number of FTP sites and compare and contrast...

this is just my humble opinion, so i'm not going to argue if i am proved wrong.

What prompted me to ask the question was, for the same server, within the space of a few minutes, the http speed was so much higher.

The only change was ftp -> http in the sources.list file.

you could use netselect-apt to rewrite your sources.list file. netselect-apt will check the local mirrors and trwrite your sources list based on which mirror responde din the least amount of time. keep in mind ping time doesn't equal bandwith so this tool isn't perfect..

man netselect-apt
http://linux.com.hk/penguin/man/1/netselect-apt.html
Make sure you read the options by default this generates sources for stable, so you will have to add an option for unstable.