Slow Yum Update

So yesterday i just experience a very strange problem related to yum update and in this case it happens to my local Linux box which is powered by Centos, what makes it strange is … i’m not updating anything on my centos box, because i just want to uninstall some library which got installed previously (faac and faad) because … well i prefer to compile the library myself … but let’s keep that aside shall we ? :)

Okay the actual problem came when i try to use various yum related command such as yum remove, yum check-update and update (and as i said before i just want to use the yum remove command but later i tried using all yum command that involves fetching headers) because that problem occur when trying to fetch the header files (you’ll notice that it takes a really loooong time even to fetch the base header file which is just 1.1 kB)

So i tried browsing around the net to see if there’s also someone who’s experiencing the same yum problem, and found a nice article about it from a Fedora site (sorry can’t remember the exact link). That article says that slow update in Yum usually came when there are new kernel coming out (though i didn’t see new kernel coming out) and thousand or more Yum users tries to connect to the server at the same time which caused that timeout problem

So what is actually the solution to solve this problem ?

1. Get the mirror list manually

2. Use your preferred mirror manually instead of letting yum choose the best mirror for your box, and don’t forget to edit it manually in your YUM repository file

3. Done

If it’s for me, in the end i just choose the mirrors.kernel.org baseurl because i found that is the fastest mirror to me :)