I just started downloading Opera 10 for Linux with my 1.2 Mbps connection at a ridiculous rate of 5 kbytes/sec
Why?
Because most CDNs use only the geographical distance from the client, to pick the best mirror for downloading.
In my country, Uruguay, this typically leads to picking a mirror from Brazil which is far from optimal, because:
- Brazilian servers are slow (compared to US ones)
- traffic from Bazil travels to US and back. This is more ridiculous than the CDNs policies, but it's what we have.
I wonder if CDNs could be made more intelligent though, using traceroute information, for instance. Perhaps the largest ones (such as Akismet) already have some better algorithm in place. And I'm sure Google already has this sorted out :)
So... I just cancelled the download and manually used a US server, even though the guys at Opera managed to make that specially hard to do :)