flatpak
Flatpak fails to download updates and install even small packages on slow Internet connection.
Linux distribution and version Manjaro (XFCE)
Flatpak version 1.6.0
Description of the problem Basically, my Internet connection is 3rd-worldly slow... But that's not the only problem. I've managed to work around this when I install or update software through Pacman or Yaourt by modifying the .conf files and using the GREAT application that is aria2 inside Pacman/Makepkg. That way I can make aria2 split the download in several simultaneous downloads and what would have take me 1 hour, now takes me 3 minutes.
Well, I haven't found a way of doing this in Flatpak... and this has rendered me unable to use it. Is absolutely impossible (and infuriating) to wait for 1 hour or more to download 50 MB just to see that it failed because of internet connectivity.
Which, BTW, is weird even by my slow Internet standards!... My Internet connection is slow, but when I take advantage of aria2's simultaneous split downloads, I can download at around 150-200 KiB/s... Flatpak downloads move at around 10 KiB/s.
So, pretty please... allow users the possibility of either advanced download management or at least being able to use download managers to download packages. Not all of us live in 1st world countries with good Internet connectivity.
Until then, sadly I can't use or recommend Flatpak. (Sorry for the rant, I'm really frustrated).
Steps to reproduce Move to Venezuela!
@tuqueque could you run it in the console using the "-v" flag and provide the output here?
Sure! Here's a snippet of an (still ongoing) attempt to update Flatpak packages (attached text file). You can see the abysmal download speed Flatpak exhibits! (when I get 20-30 times faster speeds using aria2 inside Pacman and Makepkg). FlatpakFail.txt
This may be related to #3412
flatpak install seems unable to use static deltas and that causes it to fetch the repository objects one by one, which causes slow speeds in general (and specially on repositories that contain many small files).
To verify if its the same issue you can retry exporting the environment variable OSTREE_DEBUG_HTTP=1 and seeing if flatpak install its doing many (in the order of thousands) GET petitions when downloading the data.
Hey... sorry for taking this long to reply... very busy these days!
Well... after several days of trying to update my flatpak apps, it's the very same problem. Unbearably slow downloads that fail at any minor connection hiccup. The problem is not that downloads are slow, the main problem is the lack of advanced download management. The lack of "resume" downloads, the lack of proper management/resume under very unstable connections and drops... That's why I suggested the possibility of taking advantage or great download tools like aria2.
Thank you for your time.
this issue is prevalent with a lot of package things in a lot of countries, especially in Asia.
Aria2 is a godsend but most issues in github referring to this problem get heavy resistance.
exec (aria2c args) in whatever language is supported by libc on every platform, and Aria2 has native builds on OSX, Windows, and linux.
this should be part of the dogfooding since it can enable multithreading transfers, and DHT by several means not the least of which is hosted torrents.
cheers. I landed here for the mentioned issue
Traveling away from home and now:
$ flatpak --version
Flatpak 1.16.1
my unstable internet connection makes the download of some packages impossible. :(
