If open-source software is your thing (it should be, stop pirating ), then you’ll tend to be like me - downloading OSS stuff quite frequently. Usually, OSS comes from sourceforge.net. But sourceforge is only a website, it doesn’t provide downloads. Insteads, it directs you to a list of mirror servers for the actual download. So how do you make sure you get the fast download speeds? Easy actually, choose the closest server to you. But there’s a catch, you’d have to balance it with countries that are known to be fairly broadband capable.

What do I mean? Take for example me, being in Malaysia, there are 3 mirrors from nearby countries - Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, etc (countries in Asia). Nearest mirror would be either Singapore or Indonesia, but neither could beat Japan (which is compartively farther than either). This is logical since Japan’s is the most broadband capable out of the 3. Hence, my choice of mirror server for the past year or so has been Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology’s server (Ishikawa, Japan).

If you’re in Malaysia and downloads open-source software frequently, try that server. I often get 50Kb/s downloads.