High volume of traffic on download server - move to a 2-tiers rsync setup for mirrors?

[Rich Brown]

Thank you Baptiste, for this analysis.

I re-sorted your list to by data consumption. it’s clear that the mirror traffic is 4x the second place consumer, and 3x ALL the traffic. In fact, the mirror traffic on its own seems to exceed the traffic cap.

- rsync downloads from mirrors : 4 TB / day
- HTTP downloads.openwrt.org : 1 TB / day (mostly origin traffic for Fastly CDN)
- HTTP sources.cdn.openwrt.org : 100 GB / day (mostly origin traffic for Fastly CDN)
- rsync downloads from buildbot workers : 30 GB /day
- rsync sources : 5 GB /day

I understand (and would support) your multi-tier suggestion below, but I am going to suggest a heretical solution, not because I advocate for it, but simply to start a discussion.

Proposal: We should eliminate all mirrors. 

Background: 20 years ago (more or less) mirror download sites for popular projects were essential. Primary hosts didn’t have the horsepower to handle all the download requests and traffic. In addition, it allowed “far flung” institutions to show their camaraderie and support for the project. They were a good thing. Today, in the presence of CDNs and much higher speed hosts, it’s not clear that all this “mirror machinery” is justified by the complexity.

Analysis: We should determine whether these mirrors actually help our central traffic problem. How many mirror sites do we support? Do we know the outbound traffic for In the mirror sites? What kind of data do they provide (sources? binary images?)

It is thinkable to me (although I have no information either way), that our central servers + Fastly CDN could easily handle the requests from individuals who otherwise would go to the mirrors.

If that’s the case, we could eliminate all these mirrors, eliminate the (human) communication and whatever infrastructure we support, save us some bandwidth, and some brainpower.

Of course, I may totally misunderstand the problem, or be proven to be totally wrong - that’s OK. But still I felt I need to ask the question.

Best regards,

Rich

> On Jan 6, 2026, at 06:13, Baptiste Jonglez <baptiste at bitsofnetworks.org> wrote:
> 
> I think we should move to a 2-tier mirror architecture: have only 2-3
> tier-1 mirrors that are allowed to pull from us, and then ask all other
> mirrors to become tier-2 and to pull from a tier-1 mirror.  Tier 1 mirrors
> should mirror the entire archive and should commit to a long-term
> relationship.  I can contact mirror operators I know, and if they agree,
> set things up this way.
> 
> Of course buildbot workers and the archive server would still be allowed
> to rsync from the download server.
>