stack setup download incredibly slow

[wereHamster]

I'm trying to setup stack but trying to download GHC is very slow. I'm getting less than 10Kb/s, but my internet connection is capable of much faster speeds. fast.com reports 21Mb/s. Using Chrome or curl to download the GHC release directly from GitHub (/commercialhaskell/ghc/releases/) is equally slow.

stack version: 1.0.4.3 x86_64

[wereHamster]

If I proxy all HTTP traffic through my google cloud instance (running somewhere in europe) then the download speed increases to more than 2Mb/s which makes it possible to setup stack in reasonable time.

And I noticed that stack doesn't respect the OS X proxy settings, had to set those explicitly on the command line: $ http_proxy=host:port https_proxy=host:port stack setup :(

[zach007]

stack Version 1.2.0, it is still very slow to download the ghc using setup .

[tolysz]

How are any other services running on s3 or amazon working for you? Network links have limited capacity thus if there is someone on your network saturating the same link it could make you slow.

[srid]

FWIW I see this issue as well. I'm running stack setup from a Linode VM in a Singapore data centre.

[wereHamster]

The problem with GitHub - or more specifically S3 - is that it's not meant to be a CDN. If the Commercial Haskell SIG has an amazon account, they could set up their own S3 + cloudfront distribution to speed this up.

[vlad-shatskyi]

One workaround would be to install GHC using your system's package manager, and then Stack will pick it up.

[zongwu233]

@wereHamster is right, set https_proxy can speed up the download

[seb314]

Reconnecting your home Internet connection might help, if this gives you a new IP.
At least this got me to 33MB out of 109MB...

[stefjoosten]

I got the same on Windows. I ran it with switch --verbose, to see progress. After 90 minutes of seeming inactivity I killed the session...

[polkovnikov-ph]

Still a problem. Consider using bittorrent.

[shreyasbharath]

I am having the same issue where downloading GHC is really slow (speeds of < 10 KB/sec).

Also, it takes forever to update the package index, it's stuck on the below step for hours.

Updating package index Hackage (mirrored at https://s3.amazonaws.com/hackage.fpcomplete.com/)

Are there any workarounds?

[teh-monad]

Downloading stuck at 50 KiB speed.
Tested on another stack versions(even on win), still problem.

Receiving objects: 4% (11988/264752), 1.44 MiB | 51.00 KiB/s

[polkovnikov-ph]

@shreyasbharath @teh-monad I've posted a link up there with a workaround.

[mgsloan]

It is possible to manually download and install ghc. Things are a little trickier on windows, as the setup process is more involved, also installing msys and other tools.

I, and I think most others that work on stack see consistently good download speeds. So, it is very difficult for us to work on this problem. If you can please try to diagnose what the problem is, that would be helpful. Perhaps it is just due to geographical location? Or is it possible for the code to do something better that will make the download faster?

Still a problem. Consider using bittorrent.

The problem with this is who will seed? Do we force a particular client? Using bittorrent for things like this is a big can of worms.

[polkovnikov-ph]

@mgsloan

The problem with this is who will seed?

1. Your server will seed. When release of something just happened, you might enable superseed mode to put the load off the servers fast.
2. Your clients will seed. It's no big deal to leave torrent client seeding. This is a common practice.
3. Probably major suppliers like GHC will finally make their software available as torrents. Haskell Platform has the same problem with 100KiB/s download rate, and currently they don't care too.

Do we force a particular client?

Just add an option for a shell/batch command to run the client.

Using bittorrent for things like this is a big can of worms.

Like what? Why, for example, Ubuntu doesn't mind sharing their ISOs as torrents?

[mgsloan]

Your clients will seed. It's no big deal to leave torrent client seeding. This is a common practice.

Uhh, so all the stack users will seed the torrent? Seems iffy. If you make it opt-in probably few will enable it. If you make it opt-out, we'll frustrate people that don't expect us to start using their upload bandwidth all the time.

Just add an option for a shell/batch command to run the client.

I guess so, we'd have to make some assumptions about the arguments these clients expect, where they put the files etc. etc. If you think it's easy, please open a PR adding it as an optional feature.

Like what? Why, for example, Ubuntu doesn't mind sharing their ISOs as torrents?

That's a very different case, I don't think ubuntu has their torrent stuff integrated into an install utility. For example, does apt-get use torrents? I don't think so..

[samravshanov]

probably we should try it with VPN

[junjihashimoto]

Could you use CDN like cloudfront instead of s3(https://s3.amazonaws.com/hackage.fpcomplete.com/)?
In addition to the speed of CDN, traffic price is lower than one of s3.
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
Up to 10 TB / month | $0.090 per GB
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
First 10 TB / month | $0.085 per GB

By the way, GHC(downloads.haskell.org) uses CDN(fasty).

[borsboom]

Agree, using CloudFront would be a good thing to look into.

[mtomko]

I've had stack updating the package index for 8 hours on a fast internet connection. I can't quite tell what's going on, but it seems like my 100Gbs home internet should be plenty fast.

[cdepillabout]

This can be a big problem in Japan. It really depends on the time of day, but I've had stack setup take over an hour at times.

It can be frustrating at work to wait that long to start building the project I'm trying to work on.

I think using a CDN would really help.

[ProofOfKeags]

Just ran into this as well. Do we know what is causing it?

[khoparzi]

For the moment I'm dealing with this on OSX with
brew install ghc

A better solution would be welcome.

[Programmerino]

It looks like there are mirrors for each release at: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_8_2_2.html#linux_x86_64 (8.2.2 for example). I cannot tell if the speeds are much different from GitHub from my current connection...

Also, I think that some kind of torrent solution would be great, however, I'm not sure of exact implementation. One way is just to use the preexisting magnet link protocol (magnet://) to open the default torrent client, but I think this should be only activated by a command-line parameter like --torrent or something like that. Of course, it would probably be much easier and possibly faster just to move downloads off of GitHub to, or at least provide, a faster download source.

[rgrinberg]

Any work around for this? The download is unbearably slow, I'm willing to do download things manually, but I'm not sure how to make stack aware of local tarball.

[sullyj3]

+1 from me, almost every time I've tried to get started learning stack, setup has taken several hours and seemed to get stuck, and I've had to kill it. A workaround would be awesome.

[cdepillabout]

I'm not sure if this information is helpful, but the caches for NixOS are now being served from CloudFront edge locations. This makes downloads from Asia and Australia (among other places) much faster:

https://grahamc.com/blog/cache-nixos-org-now-more-local

It would be great if stack could do something similar.

Using stack --nix might be a workaround for people currently experiencing this problem, but it is quite a heavy-handed workaround.

[suraj-mandal]

I installed the Haskell platform which already had ghc installed with it. However, when I run the stack it automatically starts downloading the ghc to an isolated location, and as usual the connection is too poor. I am using a 25Mbps net connection and it should be pretty fast. I am using Windows. What should I do?

[dbaynard]

Use system-ghc: true if you wish to avoid stack downloading its own copy of ghc (you'll need the correct version of ghc installed otherwise stack will still download it).

In general, haskell platform is not recommended with stack.

I'll bring the CDN issue to the attention of maintainers.

[polkovnikov-ph]

We are bringing this issue to attention of maintainers for several years. Probably it's a good time to do something about it.

[shiyuge]

If I proxy all HTTP traffic through my google cloud instance (running somewhere in europe) then the download speed increases to more than 2Mb/s which makes it possible to setup stack in reasonable time.

And I noticed that stack doesn't respect the OS X proxy settings, had to set those explicitly on the command line: $ http_proxy=host:port https_proxy=host:port stack setup :(

Would love to see this fixed

[dbaynard]

@shiyuge I notice your profile says Shanghai — have you seen #4376? There's a specific tsinghua mirror.

Do indicate whether this helps.

[shiyuge]

@dbaynard works wonderfully, thank you.
Still I am wondering why stack doesn't respect OS X proxy settings, perhaps I can investigate and submit a pull request if that's okay

[shiyuge]

Why stack doen't respect "system-wide" http proxy setting

It seems that on most OS, "system-wide" http proxy is only a setting, something to be "honored" by application programs. Some apps respect it, some not.

Apparently terminal does not respect this setting, so commands ran on the terminal doesn't respect this setting either. But terminal do respect "http_proxy" environment variable, so http_proxy=host:port is a solution.

Because this "system-wide" http proxy is not even respected on bash, there is little thing we can do to make stack respect this setting.

I think a little documentation regarding how to configure http proxy would still benefit the project. I believe there could always be someone wondering why his system wide http proxy settings doesn't work.

[dbaynard]

@shiyuge That's very helpful. Thank you.

I think a little documentation regarding how to configure http proxy would still benefit the project.

What precisely should this extra documentation do?

[shiyuge]

@dbaynard I think the extra documentation could be like this:

How to configure stack to use http proxy

Stack doesn't respect the system-wide http proxy, but does respect the environment variable http_proxy. To use an http proxy with ip address _IP_ and port _PORT_ for installing ghc, type in your terminal:

$ export http_proxy=IP:PORT
$ stack setup

[dbaynard]

I fixed some typos and made a few edits — but that looks good! Do you want to submit the PR, @shiyuge?

Edit: might be good to include your explanation of what goes wrong, too, from https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/issues/2240#issuecomment-438371825

[patoncrispy]

Hey all. Living in Ireland and getting a terrible connection trying to download ghc-8.4.2. What work would be involved in getting a CDN set up to improve performance?

[junjihashimoto]

Downloading ghc uses CDN.

$ dig downloads.haskell.org +short
dualstack.j.shared.global.fastly.net.
...

So I think there is the work to put the CDN in front of the hackage server and to purge the cache of the CDN when operation of deletion occurs.
And change stack's s3-link of "https://s3.amazonaws.com/hackage.fpcomplete.com/" to the CDN.

[tomasaschan]

@mgsloan This issue has been open for a long time, and I think it's still a problem (at least I am seeing excruciatingly slow download speeds to Sweden). I assume the main reasons that nothing has been done about it yet are that a) the maintainer team isn't seeing the problem, making it both low priority and difficult to work on, and/or b) the maintainer team does not have the capacity (understandable) or knowledge (unlikely) to set up a CDN with CloudFront.

However, rather than just complain about it, I'd like to offer my help in doing something about it. I don't have loads of experience with Haskell or Stack (just a happy hobbyist) but I do have some experience with configuring S3, CloudFront and related stuff on AWS. If you want, I could try to help set up a CDN that should hopefully fix this slowness (and might save some money, too!), and then either you or I could do some work to update references in appropriate places.

Either ping me here, or reach out on myfirstname.mylastname+haskellstack [at] gmail if you're interested.

[itsfarseen]

If you have access to a remote machine that you can ssh into, you can use socks tunneling using tsocks to circumvent link saturation.

1. Run ssh -D 1080 <server>.
   This will create a socks proxy that listens on port 1080 of localhost.
2. Install tsocks from your distros repo.
3. Create /etc/tsocks.conf with the following contents:

server = 127.0.0.1
server_port = 1080
server_type = 5
default_user = ""
default_pass = ""

1. Run tsocks stack <command>.

[klausmyrseth]

Been testing out stack but its not usable in a commercial environment at the moment because of this, all downloads and installs are slower then sirup, feel like I'm on a modem and I got 1gbit line with amazing connection to both google, amazon and others, I also have a fixed IP.

This is an issue you really should focus on. Just installing ghc took 72 minutes for the project and hlint as much as 13 minutes :O

[ProofOfKeags]

Is this an issue with the bandwidth of hackage mirrors? If so, would extra mirrors help? I'd be amenable to setting one up assuming the cost can stay bounded for us and that load could be appropriately balanced. The bittorrent idea mentioned up thread might also be a fantastic way to deal with this as it would allow non-organizational support of hackage redundancy. I understand this would probably be a considerable refactor as well, and it may not even belong in stack proper, but rather cabal or something.

Thoughts?

[eyeinsky]

Is the https://s3.amazonaws.com/hackage.fpcomplete.com/ currently inaccessible? From several machines I get this response to curl https://s3.amazonaws.com/hackage.fpcomplete.com/:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Error><Code>AccessDenied</Code><Message>Access Denied</Message><RequestId>115F1B801E2B1DE4</RequestId><HostId>SU7KgJQXclkgBpoBBrBQIgzqfWML6jo70edlPmhsB9mKLbB2zO0CiRTl6hQQ5g1IVnA80d8CmTU=</HostId></Error>

[debug-ito]

I'm having the same problem. stack setup (downloading GHC package of about 140MB) took 2--3 hours. Although my internet connection is not so fast, it's a lot slower than other traffics. Also, it's so slow to download and update package index (i.e. stack build is stuck with Downloading index message). Only 10--15 kbps was observed.

@eyeinsky I got the same response. Is it an expected behavior?

[eyeinsky]

@debug-ito I have no idea, sorry.

Even though this issue happens so rarely (for me, maybe once a year), it would be great to get to the bottom of this, and have some easy alternative to use whenever e.g AWS S3 is not accessible (if this is the reason at all).

[debug-ito]

@eyeinsky I used the following mirrors by Tsinghua University, and it worked well.

• https://mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/help/hackage/
• https://mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/help/stackage/

[martijnbastiaan]

I've been experiencing similar problems, although not quite as bad as @kim's (over at https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/issues/5471). In hopes of seeing a pattern, I've setup a script that periodically downloads ghc from GitHub. To establish a baseline, it first downloads a Xubuntu ISO from a server outside the country. It subsequently downloads GHC. Here's the raw data collected so far. Plotted:

(This would have been nicer as a scatter plot, but I couldn't quickly figure out how to do that properly.)

A few things to note:

• Between 2021-01-14 19:00+01:00 and 2021-01-14 23:15+01:00 stack setup would have been completely unusable for me.
• If it's not completely unusable, download speeds seem to ping-pong between either a slow speed at 1.5-2.5 MiB/s or "high" speeds at 10-15 MiB/s with few datapoints outside of those buckets.
• When downloading GHC it ultimately connects to github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com, which ping times seem to suggest it's located in US-East, while I'm in Europe-West.

This is on my home connection, but I've seen similar speeds on office connections and VPSs in proper datacentres. This behavior is worrisome, as Stack sadly remains the only beginner-friendly way to use Haskell on all platforms IMHO.

@mgsloan Would it be possible for you or other Stack developers to run these scripts too?

• download.sh: downloads Xubuntu/GHC and logs to a log file
• systemd-run --on-calendar='*:0/15' /home/user/speedtest/download.sh --uid=user: runs ^ every 15 minutes
• plot.py: parses log files / plots graphs

[qrilka]

@martijnbastiaan maybe I'm wrong but it looks like it's something about Github own configuration how it stores release assets.
Also https://github.com/commercialhaskell/ghc is a fork of GHC so Stack developers have no direct control over it.

[martijnbastiaan]

You're right, this does seem to be an issue with GitHub assets @qrilka. I've made a few VPSs around the world to see if geographical location matters at all. The results:

• New York: 100 MB/s
• Amsterdam: 30 MB/s
• Bangalore: 10 MB/s

So, it always seems to be fetching from US servers, which is bad. My guess is that smaller ISPs have worse peering agreements, leading to the behavior I and other people in this thread have been seeing.

Also https://github.com/commercialhaskell/ghc is a fork of GHC so Stack developers have no direct control over it.

Yeah, I think Stack should just use https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/, which is backed by a proper CDN (Fastly).

edit: This commit changed asset fetching from haskell.org to github.com, but no comments.

[qrilka]

@borsboom probably you know the reason GHC is fetched from Github and not Haskell.org?

[martijnbastiaan]

@qrilka @borsboom I've gone ahead and submitted a PR that changes the URLs to use downloads.haskell.org. I believe that should fix the issues experienced in this thread for the majority of users (Windows / "standard" Linux / MacOS). Feel free to close it if using GitHub Assets is more appropriate.

[borsboom]

probably you know the reason GHC is fetched from Github and not Haskell.org?

Originally this was because downloads.haskell.org was slow and unreliable. Since then they've done a lot of work on it and put it behind a CDN, so I think that's resolved. Really just historical momentum was keeping us using the github.com mirror. I think switching back to downloads.haskell.org makes sense at this point (if there does turn out to be a problem, we can always switch back).

[kim]

Do you think there is a chance that haskell.org would also host binaries of stack itself (re #5471)?

[martijnbastiaan]

With https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stackage-content/pull/82 merged, Stack now pulls GHC from downloads.haskell.org which should work properly around the globe :). I tried to test this, but sadly Stack got stuck once more, this time on:

2021-01-17 12:14:16.497805: [info] Selected mirror https://s3.amazonaws.com/hackage.fpcomplete.com/
2021-01-17 12:14:16.499561: [info] Downloading timestamp
2021-01-17 12:14:17.065309: [info] Downloading snapshot
2021-01-17 12:14:17.167117: [info] Downloading mirrors
2021-01-17 12:14:17.358902: [info] Cannot update index (no local copy)
2021-01-17 12:14:17.359185: [info] Downloading index

s3.amazonaws.com/hackage.fpcomplete.com is only served from one geographical location and behaves the same as seen here. I haven't been able to find where Stack gets https://s3.amazonaws.com/hackage.fpcomplete.com/ from. It seems to be present in neither commercialhaskell/stack nor commercialhaskell/stackage-content nor in mirrors.json on Hackage. If one of the Stack developers could point me in the right direction, that would be wonderful.

I very much care about this issue, as I think it's crucial for Haskell to have a simple and reliable way of building projects on all major platforms. Stack is currently the only way to achieve that, but with this issue present, it's only reliable in the US.

@borsboom @qrilka Is there anything I can do to help move this issue along? As I said, I care about this issue and I'm willing to put in work to close it.

---

To properly close the issue we should remove reliance on all non-CDN sources. This is everything I could find:

• [x] Host Windows/Linux binaries on downloads.haskel.org (https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stackage-content/pull/82 merged)
• [x] Host macOS binaries on downloads.haskell.org (https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/19229)
• [ ] Host stack binaries on downloads.haskell.org/~stack (or: someplace directly controlled by FPComplete if desired)
• [X] Use hackage.haskell.org as the primary source for Hackage indices (https://github.com/commercialhaskell/pantry/pull/30) (or: CDNify current sources)
• [X] Put Stackage files behind a CDN. As a proof of concept, I've made a CDN for the Hackage mirror on s3 (timestamp.json on my company's account), which was surprisingly easy to setup. Stackage snapshots are served from https://raw.githubusercontent.com, which is behind a CDN, making this a non-issue.

[qrilka]

@martijnbastiaan s3 mirror you get by default comes from https://www.stackage.org/haddock/lts-16.31/pantry-0.4.0.2/src/Pantry.html#defaultHackageSecurityConfig
I think there were some arguments for using this s3 mirror (hackagee wasn't reliable enough) but I'm not quite familiar with such details.

[mnhthng-thms]

I found this Stackage GHC mirror.

To fix the problem of Stack taking forever to download GHC when stack install:

1. Run stack install --verbose instead of stack install. What you need is this debug message (which is displayed as below in my local machine):

[debug] Downloading from https://github.com/commercialhaskell/ghc/releases/download/ghc-7.10.3-release/ghc-7.10.3-x86_64-fedora24-linux-patch1.tar.xz to /home/mnhthng/.stack/programs/x86\_64-linux/ghc-tinfo6-7.10.3.tar.xz ...

Terminate Stack for now with Ctrl + C.

1. Go to the mirror I mentioned above, then look for your desired tar.xz file (in my case, ghc-7.10.3-x86_64-fedora24-linux-patch1.tar.xz). Download it (which is much faster than the default one from Stack CLI)

2. Move the downloaded package to your local stack folder and rename it as guided by the debug message mentioned in step 1.

3. Now when you run stack install, Stack will be smart enough to realise the package been put there and it will do unpacking and the rest for you.

Peace!

[qrilka]

You could achieve the same just by setting a proper value for setup-info-locations @mnhthng-thms without extra tricks with Stack termination (I guess you meant Stack and not Stackage in "Terminate Stackage for now")

[mnhthng-thms]

You could achieve the same just by setting a proper value for setup-info-locations @mnhthng-thms without extra tricks with Stack termination (I guess you meant Stack and not Stackage in "Terminate Stackage for now")

@qrilka I did specify package-indices to other mirror rather than the default one. I've not known that I can config setup-info-locations as you recommended.

"The proper value" for stack-info-locations in my case would be:

setup-info-locations:
  - https://mirrors.cloud.tencent.com/stackage/stack-setup.yaml

Thanks for suggesting!