Hey,

I'm getting ridiculous slow download speeds when using apt-get. I'm barely getting above 55KB/s. I have a 6MB/down 512KB/up connection, so it could go faster than this.

Is there anything I could do to speed it up? I'm running Hardy Heron, I'd think the repos would be a little faster for such a popular distro.

Thanks in advance,

Brandon

It might be your ISP, might be your ISP's connectivity, might be heavy load on the server you are connected to.
Send them some money, so they can afford better connectivity?

Tred, I can go and download something... for arguments sake I can go and download IE 7 and it downloads at 650KB/s. That's 10 times the amount I'm getting on this server.

Is it possible to use a different repo to get faster speeds?

Where are you downloading it from? Who pays for that bandwidth (Microsoft? Then you paid for it when you paid for your OS, and you can therefore expect fast servers, because you have paid for them, as part of the price you paid your OS [whether you use it or not]).

Maybe. Your distro's web page will tell you about the different mirrors and sources. Many distros are moving to torrents for distribution of ISOs and updates: Look into it, it might be faster. Test it out. If you use torrents, you'll have to share your bandwidth with others who are trying to upload updates from you, but you will also be getting updates faster. It's a "trade-off". YMMV.

Otherwise, as I said earlier, send your favourite distro some money, as I have done in the past ("Thanks, great distro, I really appreciate it so here's some money, you deserve it"). This won't necessarily get you faster downloads tomorrow, but it might help things improve in general. It's optional. Do whatever you think is "the right thing to do".

Otherwise just learn to put up with slow downloads, or lost connectivity. Linux, at the moment, is free. If you are not paying, why should you complain?

Besides, it is fun & increasingly functional, and I'll do what I can to contribute: if not money today, then the time to answer Qs like this on LQ.

Use aptitude, it tends to be faster in general.

Not true in my experience. The actual downloading is the same - and the time of that depends on the speed from your connection and the server of your repos. Aptitude itself, however, normally takes somewhat longer to perform any given command than apt-get.

For the record, I say this as an aptitude user. I'm not knocking aptitude at all, just saying that you shouldn't expect it to be faster than apt-get.

tredegar:
wrong attitude to take. Show me a donate button....because for linus its usually a generic pay-me dept that goes nowhere, or worse..
goes to fraunhoffer for his busted code or the like. that chirping is the 'bust' in the mp3 codec. industry wants you to pay for dvd too. blu-ray we cracked and wrote our own code.

Yes, there are faster ways and somehow apt-p2p is worse than apt-fast, apt-get or the like. The software updater app or synaptic(its buried) has a mirror option.

UBU sets as 'country', mine being US -generic. change it.

In most cases for me in memphis, cites is fastest. some weeks its worse and like canada is faster. The best way is to choose the custom option here, and autopick the fastest. And yes, my openwrt ea4500 is properly configured. I get sustained 10Mb/sec transfers on AVERAGE.not 10 MIPS, 10 MEGA-BYTE. Want faster, go cable or direct wire FIBER to your house. I doubt the ISP is the issue.

..and for the record these bf idiots..no, U of MEM does NOT do unice. But they SHOULD.

Which repositories are being used? IF you post the contents of your /etc/apt/sources.list it will show the repositories currently being used.