Experiencing degraded download speeds on updates and plugin installations

[hetznerws]

I represent a large hosting provider in South Africa(Hetzner ZA), hosting around 70.000 WP installations. Over the past week we have been experiencing intermittent degradation when our clients attempted to either update their installation or when installing new plugins. When testing the download speed dropped as low as 20KB/s during peak business hours in South Africa.

Below you will find an MTR rest from one of our server, we did not detect any fluctuation with Ping or Traceroute tests while the degraded download speeds were being experienced.

 Host                                                      Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. 197.221.12.1                                           0.0%    18    2.9   2.0   1.1   5.1   1.0
 2. 41.204.206.37                                          0.0%    18    0.4   0.5   0.2   1.6   0.2
 3. 41-66-133-1-2.WC-RO-HET-MEE-1AE-0-4007.africainx.net   0.0%    18    0.3   2.0   0.3  19.5   4.5
 4. core.xe-1-1-0-nl-am-eqx-dce-1.nl.africainx.net         0.0%    17  202.3 205.0 202.2 230.7   7.2
 5. 176.56.179.139                                         0.0%    17  202.5 203.8 202.5 206.6   1.3
 6. 9-1.r0.102.1w.la.ca.us.iptp.net                        0.0%    17  348.4 349.4 348.4 357.6   2.2
 7. peer1network.as13768.any2ix.coresite.com               0.0%    17  350.5 350.9 350.5 352.2   0.0
 8. 66.155.40.250                                          0.0%    17  348.9 349.1 348.8 350.5   0.4

This appears to be rate limiting, but we can not be sure and hope that you will be able to provide a bit more information. We were also wondering if there is a possibility of configuring a CDN for wordpress.org on our servers in South Africa to act a local distribution point serving the African market.

Regards,
Weber

[barry]

Hi!

We are in the process of moving WordPress.org to a different hosting provider. It shouldn't impact your download speeds, but since the problems you are posted are with the old provider I'm hesitant to spend time troubleshooting them since we are no longer using them for downloads. Can you please see if you experience the problem currently? The IP you should resolve downloads.wordpress.org to is 198.143.164.250

In my testing from South Africa I was able to get speeds over 10MB/sec for plugins/themes/core which is pretty good considering TCP slow start and the relatively small file sizes.

Currently it's not advisable to run a mirror of WordPress.org in your network although that will probably change in the future.

[hetznerws]

Hi Barry,

After some testing this morning it appears to be much better and we are seeing far fewer failures. We will continue to monitor over the weekend and notify you should we experience further errors.