pkg.freebsd.org mirror having issues?

[Rafal Lukawiecki]

As a new FreeBSD user I wonder if it is a frequent problem. I am suddenly experiencing very slow access to the local mirrors of pkg.freebsd.org. Even a small file takes almost a minute. Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue (when using pkg) takes about 5-6 minutes. I have tried using several different machines from different IPs, all within AWS eu-west (Ireland). It was working well all week.

The local mirror seems to resolve to dualstack.nonssl.global.fastly.net (151.101.60.204) at the moment. Pingtime is not bad, 9ms, but their server takes almost a minute before it starts serving files. Once the file starts, it comes fast. I assume it is some sort of a server issue at their end at Fastly, perhaps they have a dead machine in the pool which makes it intermittent.

As I am building an automated server init, this means that instead of having a server provisioned in <5 min, it can take 20-35 mins, by which time it is not even considered to exist by the load balancer.

Is this common? Should I start (somehow) specifying individual mirrors directly? Thank you very much for your wisdom.
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Rafal Lukawiecki
Data Scientist 
Project Botticelli Ltd