I am an absolute beginner with opensuse and my system updates are extremely slow, even timing out. How do I know which mirror is being used and how do I configure a closer one?Or is there another way to accelerate?
Possibly you need to disable IPv6
go to Yast - Network - Devices - network Settings
In the Global options tab, uncheck: Enable IPv6
finish
reboot
If not improved - check to see if you can use a mirror local to you for the repo’s
The IPv6 trick helped me out a bit with other download speed issues, though I never looked at the download rate for the updates…
Are you running any bandwitdh-heavy applications on your network (bittorrent, streaming video from netflix, etc…) while you are trying to download the updates? That would definately slow down your update process especially if you have a slower ISP.
Try restarting your gateway/router(s), that trick sometimes works for me.
Sometimes the redirector program does not select the best mirror for your location, or sometimes the closer mirror is actually slower than one farther away (just depends on the server and the net routing). The entire list is here, trying choose a different one: openSUSE Download Mirrors - 11.0
Another possibility presuming if you browse download.opensuse.org and get good download speed, is an incorrect proxy entry in root’s .curlrc which made sense at install time.
# cat ~/.curlrc
# Changed by YaST2 module proxy 21/12/07
--proxy "http://some.where.foo:8080/"
If you’ve been unlucky and networking is generally slow, you may be losing packets for some reason, so do try to investigate with a browser and see if it’s only updates that are slow.
I’ll get back to you once I have a graphic desktop again (see 2nd thread).