Dynamically adapting dnf.conf

Project Discussion
1

Hi there!

By default dnf is excruciatingly slow, at least in comparison to pacman and apk. The slowness of installing and updating packages was my biggest shock when coming to fedora, in a bad way. I wasn’t aware it was possible to tweak this behaviour until recently, and I’ve been using Fedora for more than half a year now. It’s been said the current dnf config is better for / protects low bandwidth users in countries with few or no mirrors.

Instead of providing all users with a slow package management experience out of the box, I suggest we implement logic which adjusts dnf.conf according to a few criteria.

If

  1. The user is connected to a high throughput/bandwidth network.

  2. The connection is established in a country where mirrors have good capacity.

  3. The network connection is classified as “not rate limited”

  4. /etc/dnf/dnf.conf hasn’t been user edited.

Then set the following parameters in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf:

max_parallel_downloads=10
fastestmirror=True

If the criteria aren’t met, no changes are made to dnf.conf.

This should provide a big lift in UX for users who have great internet connection but aren’t comfortable editing system configuration files, and should provide no downside for other users.

Your thoughts?

2

fastestmirror=True changes DNF to do client side latency testing of the mirrors after MirrorManager selects them for you anyway. In most cases, the server-side mirror negotiation provides sufficient selection.

max_parallel_downloads=20 will make it so DNF swamps your connection for downloads. That’s probably not great if the user wants to do other things while it downloads stuff.

3

I have no argument against keeping fastestmirror=False.

max_parallel_downloads=20 may be a bit much for most, but by the same coin max_parallel_downloads=3 is like filling a bathtub using a teaspoon.
If all I have is a teaspoon, then by all means I’ll use it, but if I have a garden hose it would be illogical not to use the hose.

I’m no expert, but isn’t it possible for the computer to detect when the network connection is swamped/congested?
Throttling DNF when the network is swamped/congested seems like a healthier choice than having DNF throttled all the time.

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