Launchpad itself

Downloads from ppa.launchpadcontent.net continue to be extremely slow

Asked by Daniel Fox

This has been mentioned repeatedly over the last decade but I figured I'd mention it again since it continues to be an issue we're running into.

Our company distributes our (open-source) software via Launchpad, and despite a few oddities and hiccups that we've run into it's hard to argue it's not a great service. The one issue we're having is the upload and download speeds for Launchpad are very slow; this includes downloading from ppa.launchpadcontent.net as well as uploading to ppa.launchpad.net (both of which are on the same IP).

I'm not trying to be a diva or anything, but when I can download from an Ubuntu mirror at 68 MB/s but downoad from Launchpad at 250 KB/s it gets to be irritating; the packages we're uploading are fairly large for an Ubuntu package (32 MB for one, as an example), and especially when we're uploading versions for multiple releases (and we're providing these mirrors for our customers as well).

It would be nice if it were possible to throw some kind of CDN in front of launchpad; work something out with Cloudflare, maybe? Maybe it's just dreams.

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Clinton Fung (clinton-fung) said : 		#1

Hi Daniel

My team and I build and manage Launchpad, including the PPA service.

Thank you for your feedback. You're right to point out the issues you've experienced. 250 kB/s is certainly unacceptably slow in 2025. We have a fair idea of the issues leading to this, and we are actively investigating possible remediations. We have some work earmarked over the next 6 - 12 months to address this.

I'm not sure that adding a CDN in from of PPAs would necessarily solve the problem, unless you're thinking of many repeated downloads of the same content. If you're thinking of relatively small numbers of downloads over a moderately long period of time (days to weeks, as opposed to seconds to minutes), then I think it's unlikely it would provide much value.

In the meantime, as a workaround for downloads, I can suggest that you make use of https://snapshot.ppa.launchpadcontent.net/. If you simply replace ppa.launchpadcontent.net with snapshot.ppa.launchpadcontent.net you should see a substantial improvement. In time, we wish to bring the same benefits to the main ppa.launchpadcontent.net endpoint, but there are various complicating infrastructural factors that are slowing that down. Let us know how that works out for you.

I don't have a useful workaround to suggest for uploads at this stage, but we are working on it.

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