When a server is not reachable Portage tries for more than a dozen minutes to recht the server. Please change that drastically. I mean, we're not in the stone age with 1200 baud modems and bad lines. ;) Please change it to try to connect for max. 20 sec and two or three retries. example: carsten@iglu kscope $ ebuild kscope-1.4.1.ebuild digest >>> Downloading 'http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz' --19:27:21-- http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz => `/usr/portage/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz' Resolving www.ibiblio.org... 152.2.210.80 Connecting to www.ibiblio.org|152.2.210.80|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently Location: http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz [following] --19:27:22-- http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz => `/usr/portage/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz' Resolving distro.ibiblio.org... 152.46.7.109 Connecting to distro.ibiblio.org|152.46.7.109|:80... failed: Connection timed out. Retrying. --19:28:23-- http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz (try: 2) => `/usr/portage/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz' Connecting to distro.ibiblio.org|152.46.7.109|:80... failed: Connection timed out. Retrying. --19:29:25-- http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz (try: 3) => `/usr/portage/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz' Connecting to distro.ibiblio.org|152.46.7.109|:80... failed: Connection timed out. Retrying. --19:30:28-- http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz (try: 4) => `/usr/portage/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz' Connecting to distro.ibiblio.org|152.46.7.109|:80... failed: Connection timed out. Retrying. --19:31:32-- http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz (try: 5) => `/usr/portage/distfiles/kscope-1.4.1.tar.gz' Connecting to distro.ibiblio.org|152.46.7.109|:80... failed: Connection timed out. Giving up. No digest file available and download failed. That make half an hour, if you hit to dead servers in a row.
make sure your make.globals is up2date and you haven't set those values yourself in make.conf (via FECTH/RESUMECOMMAND), the current defaults are 60s timeout and 5 retries, if you think that's too much you can always change it in make.conf.
sys-apps/portage-2.1.1_pre5-r3 /etc/make.globals is from 21. this months, not touched manually, wget parameters are -t 5 -T 60 and i don't use a custom FETCHCOMMAND via make.conf. Imho five retries is definitely too much and -T sets more than a single timeout according to the wget man page: -T seconds --timeout=seconds Set the network timeout to seconds seconds. This is equivalent to specifying --dns-timeout, --connect-time-out, and --read-timeout, all at the same time. I guess the timeouts accumulate...
It's already been changed wrt Bug 101196. Gradually lowering the retries/timeout to almost zero doesn't solve the real problem (dead mirrors in thirdpartymirrors list) in any way. We should rather focus on getting Bug 129015 fixed (and producing some script that automates this). Meanwhile, I've cleaned up GNU mirrors list (someone see Bug 144831 and commit it), will try to cleanup the others as well until there's a better solution to Bug 129015.
Jakub, cleaning up the mirror list doesn't solve the problem, when a server is temporary down. While five retries are excessive imho, I redraw this bug, since it's probably more a bug with wget's handling of --timeout or with communication between server and client.
