Why is the update of the registries so slow?

I’ll start with the latest julialang version and see where that gets me.

btw https://status.julialang.org times out, “taking too long to respond” so maybe that’s the issue.

Perhaps julialang.org is blocked by your proxy. Ask your admin. Or just use your phone to get internet…

I am the admin, and no it’s not blocked. It came through eventually, but apparently it’s intermittent for me.

This bar graph seems to indicate some issues recently:

Perhaps for some reason I’m getting connected to eu-central instead of us-west?

Oh us-west also shows issues:

Alternatively set it so a different Pkg Server, e.g.

export JULIA_PKG_SERVER=us-east.pkg.julialang.org

in the shell, or

ENV["JULIA_PKG_SERVER"] = "us-east.pkg.julialang.org"

from within Julia.

Ok, if all of them have problems you can only complain here in the forum and wait until the problems are fixed…

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The time is the same here, although I am using JuliaPro_v1.5.4-1 on Windows and was adding a package. The first thing Julia did was to spend 11 min updating General. Then it took only a few seconds updating JuliaComputingRegistry and the rest of stuff. This was not the first time it took about 10 min updating General.

Might be a Windows Defender thing: Pkg fetching takes very long at 99.9% @ v1.6 (Win 10) - #7 by carstenbauer

I’ve been seeing the same thing on Linux over the last days though (although as usual worse on Windows).

If it’s happening on Linux as well, it sounds like a network/server issue, not the Windows problem that unpacking a tarball is ungodly slow. Fortunately, the tarball unpacking issue should be a thing of the past on all platforms with the 1.7 release since we’re now leaving the registry tarballs as-is on disk instead of unpacking them: https://github.com/JuliaLang/Pkg.jl/pull/2431.

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Just tried again on 1.6.1 on a Manjaro machine, again got stuck - this time on 100% rather than 99.9% - for about 4 minutes. My internet is a bit slow this morning but still clocks in at about 15MB/s, which I would have thought should be well enough?

How fast should I expect an update of the general registry to be assuming everything works normally (and I’m not on Windows)?

Would you be able to try the 1.7 beta or compile the release-1.6 branch form source? There are some fixes to Downloads that should be included in both of those and it would be interesting to see if that improves things for you.

1.7beta seemed a bit faster, although still got stuck for a noticeable time on 100% but a marked improvement!

The problem I was having was that the us-west package server had a problem with it’s IPv6 connectivity. Perhaps others are having similar issues on other PKG servers?

See this thread [resolved] Problem with the IPv6 connectivity of the us-west Pkg server

Hi, recurrent issue indeed. Often stuck on a linux computation server with > Go connection. Painful.

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I’m having the same problem on Windows. Is there a list of package servers? I live in southern Europe. I’d like to try changing the server before trying anything else. (I have an almost 200mbs working conncection and I’m on the latest available version of Julia: 1.6.4)

I highly doubt it is related to the package server. As mentioned above, Windows + Julia 1.6 and early this was a common issue. The behavior should be changed in 1.7, so I’d suggest the first thing you try is install 1.7.0-rc3 and add some packages and watch how fast it is.

I agree, 1.7 is overwhelmingly superior to 1.6. LTS should have been set for 1.7, IMO.

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99.9% of people should use the latest stable version of Julia, not LTS. If you’re regularly updating packages you definitely aren’t in the hyper-risk-averse category of user who should actually be using LTS.

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Frankly the number of people using LTS when they shouldn’t be makes me really wonder if we shouldn’t just do away with the whole LTS concept entirely. People with really conservative needs can just continue to use whatever old version they happen to be using.

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Having LTS makes for more work for package maintainers: I for instance have to maintain some packages to be compatible with anything from 1.6 up because people want to use them with 1.6, and I myself want to use the latest versions of packages.

There could be a “security patches only” level of support for selected versions.

1 Like