Slow download speed / improve mirror infrastructure
Currently the releases of SystemRescue are hosted at Sourceforge and downloading is done through their mirror infrastructure. For some time I was annoyed by slow download speeds from there. When I downloaded SystemRescue from another location last week it was especially slow so I decided to do some more comprehensive speed measurement.
I compared download speeds for systemrescue-9.01-amd64.iso from all European mirrors offered by Sourceforge at about the same time. I used 5 different internet connections for this:
The average download speed through 2 of the access providers was 2.5 MByte/s and 3.5 MByte/s. This means downloading the whole iso image of SystemRescue takes between 3.3 to 4.7 minutes. When you get assigned to the slowest mirror, the download could take as long as 1.5 hours. Even the downloads from "perfect" datacenter connections only yield good speeds from some of the mirrors.
I think these download speeds could be improved.
My experience of Sourceforge is that it is stable, but there hasn't really been any innovation over the last years. My gut feeling is that it is past it's prime. So I would not expect them to improve the download speeds on their own.
Here are some ideas of what could be done to improve it:
1. Fastly CDN
Fastly is a commercial global content delivery network. They offer a Open Source program where they offer their services for free to Open Source projects: https://www.fastly.com/open-source/
I know that Rocky Linux uses them and the feedback from their infrastructure people was positive. A test download URL is: https://download.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/isos/x86_64/Rocky-8.5-x86_64-minimal.iso
2. Bunny CDN
Bunny is a commercial global content delivery network. While their pricing is quite reasonable: https://bunny.net/pricing they also sponsor some Open Source projects, Asahi Linux is sponsored by them: https://twitter.com/AsahiLinux/status/1500169007554789378 It doesn't look like they have a formalized form for this like Fastly, you probably have to contact their sales and ask.
A test download URL is: https://cdn.asahilinux.org/os/asahi-base.zip
3. Own mirror network
This is the traditional way for linux distros: Provide a master rsync mirror and then ask admins of servers worldwide to mirror from there. Then provide a mirrorlist on the SystemRescue website, best with a script that selects a mirror near the person downloading. There are programs that automate parts of this: https://github.com/fedora-infra/mirrormanager2 but it would still be a bit of work to set up and maintain.
I know some admins that provide mirroring for other linux distros and could ask them to add SystemRescue.
My suggestion would be to still upload to Sourceforge, but also use Fastly or Bunny. Then point the primary download URL on https://www.system-rescue.org/Download/ to Fastly/Bunny. Sourceforge could still be the primary location for people wanting to download older releases.