Running ]update on a fresh installation (no .julia folder) of Julia 1.5.1 just took me 35 minutes. Windows defender real-time protection was disabled. Observed this behavior on two separate Win 7 machines.
Connected with that issue, the difficulty of offline package installation is a glaring deficiency of Pkg.jl. Perhaps working without connectivity looks like an exotic and rare use case to someone with background in web development, but it is frequently necessary. It may be an organizational policy, or a machine may be interfacing some rare hardware and custom drivers could be damaged by the uncontrolled Windows 10 updates.
The āalways-onā assumption also excludes cost-sensitive users, to whom a lab of a dozen machines all downloading the same set of packages is a significant drain on resources.
[Previously, I was having trouble downloading from eu-central.pkg.julialang.org, no longer hanging or aborting at 99%, maybe problem wasnāt server side. Based on your name Iām not sure if you use eu-central, what do you connect to? Is it for you maybe a temporary problem, possibly neither a fault of julia?]
Running ]update on a fresh installation (no .julia folder) of Julia 1.5.1 just took me 35 minutes.
Thatās very strange, for me on Linux (and I assume should be the experience for all including on Windows) I estimate about 10 sec. and the download itself 1.4 sec (I was very curious, as with a truly empty folder I wasnāt sure what update would even do):
$ mv ~/.julia .julia_bak
$ ~/julia-1.5.1/bin/julia -q
(@v1.5) pkg> update
Installing known registries into `~/.julia`
--2020-08-31 13:01:16-- https://pkg.julialang.org/registry/23338594-aafe-5451-b93e-139f81909106/81e1c37985c220a9a8052358e20d28c2cc94ffab
Resolving pkg.julialang.org (pkg.julialang.org)... 151.101.62.217
Connecting to pkg.julialang.org (pkg.julialang.org)|151.101.62.217|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 EU internal redirect trigger
Location: https://eu-central.pkg.julialang.org/registry/23338594-aafe-5451-b93e-139f81909106/81e1c37985c220a9a8052358e20d28c2cc94ffab [following]
--2020-08-31 13:01:16-- https://eu-central.pkg.julialang.org/registry/23338594-aafe-5451-b93e-139f81909106/81e1c37985c220a9a8052358e20d28c2cc94ffab
Resolving eu-central.pkg.julialang.org (eu-central.pkg.julialang.org)... 18.157.163.169
Connecting to eu-central.pkg.julialang.org (eu-central.pkg.julialang.org)|18.157.163.169|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2118082 (2,0M) [application/tar]
Saving to: ā/tmp/jl_jtPV7U-download.gzā
/tmp/jl_jtPV7U-download.gz 100%[====================================================================================>] 2,02M 1,40MB/s in 1,4s
2020-08-31 13:01:17 (1,40 MB/s) - ā/tmp/jl_jtPV7U-download.gzā saved [2118082/2118082]
Added registry `General` to `~/.julia/registries/General`
Updating registry at `~/.julia/registries/General`
No Changes to `~/.julia/environments/v1.5/Project.toml`
No Changes to `~/.julia/environments/v1.5/Manifest.toml`
This 2 MB temp file is now gone, itās not huge by todayās standards, but Iām still a bit curious about its contents.
I have the same experience as you on Linux, but not on Windows. The fault is not with server, because Iāve had this issue on two different ISPs at different times, solely on Windows and never on Linux.
I sometimes want update to be faster when .julia isnāt in fact empty, or e.g. in my test adding Plots.jl to an empty folder.
I want to ask was your .julia for sure empty? What I think might be happening, is similar to my test. You had an old 1.4 install. In my case I truly have an empty .julia and just added Plots.jl (to Julia 1.5.1), to have a non-empty folder for a previous version.
Then in a later version, Julia 1.6 I did:
(@v1.6) pkg> st
Status `~/.julia/environments/v1.6/Project.toml` (empty project)
Note, .julia isnāt empty, only that file. Maybe what you saw assuming .julia empty?
Then I did:
(@v1.6) pkg> update
but it was even quicker than with truly empty. Iām just thinking could stuff from older version in the folder (e.g. if packages there not on latest version) interfere? [I just saw your answer now about only on Windows, it might be a bug, report it? or already done?]
Like I said please report it (canāt be intended behavior, and Iām surprised nobody noticed), with the Windows label, with needed (at least minimal) info and link to this Discourse thread. [I hope they consider it, while Win7 no longer supportedā¦ I doubt the issue is with Win7, but you never know, it might be related to something that doesnāt manifest on Win10.]
You didnāt answer that part, and is you ISP/country connection otherwise really slow? If you redo this, do you get similar to I did, only 2 MB file? And how long do that-size files usually take for you to download? Iām not sure I can help more, Iāve run out of ideas.
But the rr tool it uses is only for Linux. On Linux I might use e.g. strace, but Iām not sure whatās a good substitute on Windows (itās been long since I used).
Can you elaborate? At some point you obviously need internet access to get the files to disk. Do you want to transfer files using a thumbdrive? Or can you connect the computer to install, and then work offline?