GCE ubuntu mirror slowness

[Arek_TCI]

Hi, I'm facing some serious issues with http://gce.clouds.archive.ubuntu.com/ - it's very slow, fetching headers takes some minutes, and the speed of downloading packages is very slow. I'm able to reproduce this on GCE machines and locally also.

[kolban]

I'm not familiar with that site.  I notice it ends in ubuntu.com and hence is likely hosted by Ubuntu themselves.  Where did you find the reference to that site?  What is it you are hoping to download / access from there?  Once we know that, maybe we can look for an alternative or at least determine who to contact for queries.   I can attest that while trying to view it in a browser, its response (2023-02-06) does appear to be very slow.

[Arek_TCI]

Isn't that default ubuntu mirror on GCE ubuntu images?

[kolban]

For GCE images, I've always just used the Google Cloud images described here.   Running

gcloud compute images list

Seems to show a list of all the images I can use to create a GCE boot disk.  Can you describe what it is you are looking to achieve?  When I update an OS, I just use the normal Linux update tools such as synaptic or apt.

[Arek_TCI]

Yes, and in case of public ubuntu images, for example ubuntu-1804-bionic-v20230131 there is default mirror *.gce.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ configured in /etc/apt/sources.list
Which currently is very slow.

[kolban]

Ahh .. Thank you!!!  The lightbulb has now gone on for me.   I created an instance of ubuntu-1804-bionic-v20230131 and then visited /etc/apt/sources.list file.  I looked in there and found that most of the links take us to:

http://us-central1.gce.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/

This is different from the link you supplied which was:

http://gce.clouds.archive.ubuntu.com/ 

What specifically is coded in your /etc/apt/sources.list for your environment?  When I try and browse http://us-central1.gce.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ I appear to get near realtime responses.

[Arek_TCI]

Yes, but some of my images that are based on public GCP ubuntu images (maybe they are bit older than v20230131) have gce.clouds.archive.ubuntu.com as a default mirror - maybe regional mirrors were implemented later? Anyway as this is default apt mirror on GCE images - isn't it managed by GCP?
I see some progress in terms of response time, but still the transfer is very slow.

[kolban]

I am seeing comments on slowness on the "non-regional" archives at Ubuntu ... for example:

Enhancement request: use GCE’s in-cloud Ubuntu mirrors to improve performance

I'm wondering (out loud) if the non regional versions are "hosted" by Ubuntu while the regional versions are hosted out of Google itself with their extremely robust networking and points of presence.  What would be the impact of editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file and changing the URLs to use your closest regional version?