I recently upgraded my working Ubuntu 7.10 to Ubuntu 8.04. I hadn’t used the computer in about a month, so there were quite a few updates to do. Namely 83 updates.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

It was flying at anywhere from 300KB/sec to 950KB/sec on most of the packages, but then would falter down to 4000bytes/sec (and sometimes even less). I figured it was the Repositories getting nailed, or my network connection becoming unruly.

But, after searching for a while, I found the answer: the us.archive.ubuntu servers are SLOW. Doesn’t matter that the servers reside in the same country I’m located.

Edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file to remove the “us.”

cd /etc/apt
cp /sources.list sources.list.old
nano sources.list

Anywhere it says “us.archive.ubuntu” remove the us., then it should say “http://archive.ubuntu” etc.