Comment 5 for bug 464087

> I don't know how well the Retry button idea would work, though, because
> the installer is already doing that behind the scenes, trying out
> different mirrors (or at least, it should be doing that...)

Since the desktops of my system are still hosed, I decided to aid recovery by downloading a 'live CD' .iso file.
So I told the web dialog that I'm in the United States, and it proceeded to download at a data rate of 15-20 kbps, with an expected completion time of ~15 hours. I aborted the download, thinking that maybe mirrors in some other country wouldn't be so busy. My lucky choice was Finland, which sent the file over at ~500 kbps!

This result implies than any Ubuntu mirror load balancing is within the chosen country, rather than worldwide. There may be policy reasons for this, but the results are pretty bad for people in the States, and it could happen in other countries with a shortage of mirror bandwidth, too. The obvious suggestion is to do load balancing against all sites worldwide, rather than for a specific country -- or some variation of that, e.g., monitor all mirrors and report to the user which mirrors (or countries) are least loaded. This could make for much better (balanced) mirror utilization -- and happier users.

I have recently done several major updates to my Win Vista system, and while they were pretty slow (1-2 hours for the full upgrade), the experience was fairly painless. I apologize for making the comparison, but I view them as the competition, if not the enemy, and it's what I actually experienced.

Anyway, thank you for your comments and suggestions. I really appreciate it.