Fast, parallel downloads for YUM. It uses good old urllib in place of URLGrabber to enable threading capabilities.

• Minimize download time using threads instead of serial downloads
• Thread both package and metadata downloads
• Utilize more than one of the available mirrors for each repository to distribute HTTP server load and avoid connection/bandwidth limits enforced by individual mirror servers

As long as yum-fastestmirror is enabled, yum-rocket will favor the fastest mirrors. It will use a configurable subset (default fastest 3) of the mirrors for each repository. Of the subset, the mirror deemed fastest will be favored, then second fastest, etc.

This is accomplished by tracking the number of threads downloading from each mirror. If the fastest mirror has 1 download active, then the other mirrors in the subset will be used in order of fastness for further downloads until either a faster mirror completes a download and is available for another, or all mirrors have 1 download active, in which case each mirror will start accepting a second thread, again in order of fastness until there are 2 downloads active for each mirror, or a job completes. This will continue until all downloads have been completed.

This is highly experimental and not even proven viable at this point.

These are some basic tests I ran using the downloadonly YUM plugin with yum-rocket using the default settings (5 threads spanning 3 mirrors):

3.7 MB     00:01  <-- With yum-rocket
3.7 MB     00:07  <-- Without yum-rocket

16 MB     00:08  <-- With yum-rocket
16 MB     00:13  <-- Without yum-rocket

47 MB     00:21  <-- With yum-rocket
47 MB     00:49  <-- Without yum-rocket

69 MB     00:33  <-- With yum-rocket
69 MB     00:40  <-- Without yum-rocket

As you can see, there is a good deal of variation in the results. The difference that threaded downloads can make depends on many things, including the selected mirrors, whether yum-fastestmirror is enabled or not, and even the individual transaction being performed.

Occasionally yum-rocket will download the repomd.xml file for a repository with metalinks enabled, and the downloaded copy won't end up matching the one that would be downloaded via the metalink. A warning will be thrown by YUM and the metadata file will be re-downloaded.

Since yum-rocket uses urllib, keepalive's are not implemented. This can result in a performance penalty in re-establishing connections.

Build an RPM for installation:

git clone https://github.com/ryanuber/yum-rocket
tar czf yum-rocket.tar.gz yum-rocket
rpmbuild -tb yum-rocket.tar.gz
rpm -ivh rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/yum-plugin-rocket-*.rpm

Or just put the two files into the right places:

git clone https://github.com/ryanuber/yum-rocket
cp yum-rocket/yum-rocket/rocket.py /usr/lib/yum-plugins
cp yum-rocket/yum-rocket/rocket.conf /etc/yum/pluginconf.d