[talk] Strength of internet connection has significant impact on OpenBSD 'pkg-add'

[Sujit K M]

On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 10:19 PM, James E Keenan <jkeenan at pobox.com> wrote:
> OpenBSD's pkg_add command and certain forms of pkg_info -- e.g., pkg_info -Q
> -- are sensitive to the quality of one's internet connection to a surprising
> degree.
>
> Background
>
> In the last week of December I noticed that my home internet service --
> Verizon DSL -- was deteriorating severely.  Previously, I might get at most
> 3% packet loss during 'ping'.  Now I was losing 11% -- and that was to go up
> to over 20% at times.  I could still download most files, albeit much more
> slowly.  However, when I tried to download the Vagrant box holding an
> OpenBSD-6.2 VM prepared by Brian Callahan for the Jan 3 NYCBUG meeting, the
> estimated time was more than 14 hours.  (Even when I got to LMHQ for the
> meeting, the download still took between 60 and 90 minutes, so that was a
> very large file indeed.)

I would suggest some sort of problem with the OpenBSD and Verizon Network
in case of the packet loss, since below you had mentioned it is zero in another
network you had tried. But that said why is a port download taking 14 hours,
I would either suggest lot of collision within your network or with the network
you are connected to and I think this is a case of Random Collision which would
be because there is not a case of every 3rd or 5th packet for instance
to be lost
due to collision, this causes havoc to packet assembly on your machine as on the
Server.