Bsrgvty

You don't have to do any searching anymore - as ajmitch has explained, you can use deb mirror to have the best mirror picked for you automatically.

apt-get now supports a 'mirror' method that will automatically select a good mirror based on your location. Putting:

deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt precise main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt precise-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt precise-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt precise-security main restricted universe multiverse

on the top in your /etc/apt/sources.list file should be all that is needed to make it automatically pick a mirror for you based on your geographical location.

Lucid (10.04), Maverick (10.10), Natty (11.04), and Oneiric (11.10) users can replace precise with the appropriate name.

Here's one way that will always work, using good old netselect and some grep magic:

The terminal-addict's "find best server" hack!

• Download and dpkg -i netselect for your architecture from the Debian website. (it's about 125 KB, no dependencies)


• 
  

  Find the fastest Ubuntu mirrors from your location, either up-to-date or at most six hours behind with this (I'll explain it below, sorry it doesn't split up nicely in Markdown)

  
  
  

  sudo netselect -v -s10 -t20 `wget -q -O- https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors | grep -P -B8 "statusUP|statusSIX" | grep -o -P "(f|ht)tp://[^"]*"`
  

  
  


• 
  

  netselect:

  
  
  
  1. 
     -v makes it a little verbose -- you want to see progress dots and messages telling you different mirrors mapping to the same IP were merged :)
  
  
  2. 
     -sN controls how many mirrors you want at the end (e.g. top 10 mirrors)
  
  
  3. 
     -tN is how long each mirror is speed-tested (default is 10; the higher the number, the longer it takes but the more reliable the results.)
  
  


• 
  

  This is the backquotes stuff (don't paste, just for explanation)

  
  
  

  
  wget -q -O- https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors
  | grep -P -B8 "status(UP|SIX)" 
  | grep -o -P "(f|ht)tp://[^"]*" 
  

  
  
  
  1. 
     wget pulls the latest mirror status from https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors.
  
  
  2. The first grep extracts mirrors that are up-to-date or six-hours behind, along with 8 lines of previous context which includes the actual ftp/http URLs
  
  
  3. The second grep extracts these ftp/http URLs
  
  


• 
  

  Here's a sample output from California, USA:

  
  
  

  
  60 ftp://mirrors.se.eu.kernel.org/ubuntu/
  70 http://ubuntu.alex-vichev.info/
  77 http://ftp.citylink.co.nz/ubuntu/
  279 http://ubuntu.mirrors.tds.net/pub/ubuntu/
  294 http://mirror.umd.edu/ubuntu/
  332 http://mirrors.rit.edu/ubuntu/
  364 ftp://pf.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
  378 http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu/
  399 ftp://ubuntu.mirror.frontiernet.net/ubuntu/
  455 http://ubuntu.mirror.root.lu/ubuntu/
  

  
  
  
  • The "ranks" are an arbitrary metric; lower is usually better.
  
  
  • If you're wondering why the kernel.org Sweden-EU mirror and an NZ mirror are in the top three from California, well, so am I ;-) The truth is that netselect doesn't always choose the most appropriate URL to display when multiple mirrors map to a single IP; number 3 is also known as nz.archive.ubuntu.com!
  
  

Oneliner that select best (by download speed) mirror based on mirrors.ubuntu.com for yours ip.

curl -s http://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt | xargs -n1 -I sh -c 'echo `curl -r 0-102400 -s -w %speed_download -o /dev/null /ls-lR.gz` ' |sort -g -r |head -1| awk ' print $2 '

Here is a Python script I wrote that finds mirrors with the lowest TCP latency.

The script also provides bandwidth and status data taken from launchpad, and will generate a new sources.list file automatically or using a mirror chosen from a list.

A usage example that lets you choose from 5 US mirrors with the lowest latency to your machine:

$ apt-select --country US -t 5 --choose

I developed a simple ping-based nodejs script that tests the servers listed on mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt and returns the fastest one:

sudo npm install -g ffum
ffum

Please let me know if you find it useful or have any suggestions (=

I know this doesn't directly answer the OP's question, but there's a button in the desktop/GUI version of Ubuntu that finds the best mirror for you. It seemed to work pretty well, so I looked into it briefly, but didn't have time to follow up.

The reason I bring it up is because I think it would be pretty straight forward and usable to make it into a command line utility.

If anyone is interested, the test seems to be located in:

/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/softwareproperties/MirrorTest.py

Again, that's about as far as I got, but I figured I'd leave this here in case anyone wanted it. I'll probably pick back up on it when I have a little more time.

Command That Finds Fast Mirrors

On Ubuntu 18.04 I got good results by running

 python /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/softwareproperties/MirrorTest.py

That prints a list of mirrors organized by "time" (not explained), and then I used one of the mirrors it ranked highest.

More Details

For me, it was useful to test a few of the top results output by that command by setting them as my mirror in /etc/apt/sources.list and then doing

time sudo apt update

to see how long it took to download the package list from that mirror. I tested the top three suggestions and they were all fast, but one of them was twice as fast as the other two in the time sudo apt update test.

Here's an example output from python /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/softwareproperties/MirrorTest.py:

mirror: es-mirrors.evowise.com - time: 0.183778047562
mirror: it-mirrors.evowise.com - time: 0.18604683876
mirror: la-mirrors.evowise.com - time: 0.192630052567
mirror: ny-mirrors.evowise.com - time: 0.208723068237
mirror: mirrors.accretive-networks.net - time: 0.385910987854
mirror: mirror.team-cymru.org - time: 0.46785402298
mirror: mirrors.psu.ac.th - time: 1.64231991768
and the winner is: es-mirrors.evowise.com

For the command line, you can use a Python tool called apt-smart

A usage example that lets you list ranked mirrors within your country (automatically detect):

$ apt-smart -l

With -l, or --list-mirrors, you will get ( example output from Travis CI U.S. server ):

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Rank | Mirror URL | Available? | Updating? | Last updated | Bandwidth |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 1 | http://mirrors.gigenet.com/ubuntua... | Yes | No | Up to date | 1.73 MB/s |
| 2 | http://mirror.genesisadaptive.com/... | Yes | No | Up to date | 1.68 MB/s |
| 3 | http://ubuntu.mirrors.tds.net/pub/... | Yes | No | Up to date | 1.4 MB/s |
| 4 | http://repos.forethought.net/ubuntu | Yes | No | Up to date | 1.35 MB/s |
| 5 | http://repo.miserver.it.umich.edu/... | Yes | No | Up to date | 937.62 KB/s |
...
| 75 | http://mirror.cc.vt.edu/pub2/ubuntu | Yes | No | 1 day behind | 659.67 KB/s |
| 76 | http://mirror.atlantic.net/ubuntu | Yes | No | 2 days behind | 351.26 KB/s |
| 77 | http://mirror.lstn.net/ubuntu | Yes | No | 4 days behind | 806.81 KB/s |
| 78 | http://mirrors.usinternet.com/ubun... | Yes | No | 4 weeks behind | 514.31 KB/s |
| 79 | http://mirrors.arpnetworks.com/Ubuntu | Yes | No | 19 weeks behind | 418.94 KB/s |
| 80 | http://mirrors.ocf.berkeley.edu/ub... | Yes | Yes | Up to date | 446.07 KB/s |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full URLs which are too long to be shown in above table:
1: http://mirrors.gigenet.com/ubuntuarchive
2: http://mirror.genesisadaptive.com/ubuntu
3: http://ubuntu.mirrors.tds.net/pub/ubuntu
5: http://repo.miserver.it.umich.edu/ubuntu
...
78: http://mirrors.usinternet.com/ubuntu/archive
80: http://mirrors.ocf.berkeley.edu/ubuntu

Of course, apt-smart can also change your sources.list if you want to:

$ apt-smart -a

With -a , or --auto-change-mirror to discover available mirrors, rank the mirrors by connection speed and update status and update /etc/apt/sources.list to use the best available mirror.

With -c , or --change-mirror MIRROR_URL to update /etc/apt/sources.list to use the given MIRROR_URL.

Compared with other tools:

• 
  apt-smart automatically finds where you are so you don't need to specify the country when you travel abroad.


• 
  apt-smart does real HTTP download from each mirror to get more accurate results ( bandwidth & status ) and supports HTTP proxy, rather than using ping and relying on launchpad 's inaccurate data.


• 
  apt-smart is being maintained, whereas most other tools leave issues unfix for a long time.

You can easily install apt-smart via pip, for detailed copy'n'paste install commands and usages please see Project Readme.

I use the following to auto select mirrors (and disable deb-src)

sudo sed -i -e 's%http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu%mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt%' -e 's/^deb-src/#deb-src/' /etc/apt/sources.list

If you want a utility to do this you could implement such a utility as a simple bash script like the following. This might be useful if you want to use the utility without needing pip/nodejs.

#!/bin/bash
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
 echo Usage: sudo $0 http://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt
 echo OR consider one of...
 for mirror in `wget http://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt -O - 2> /dev/null`
 do 
 (
 host=`echo $mirror |sed s,.*//,,|sed s,/.*,,`
 echo -e `ping $host -c1 | grep time=|sed s,.*time=,,`:' tt'$mirror
 ) &
 done
 wait
 exit 1
fi

OLD_SOURCE=`cat /etc/apt/sources.list | grep ^deb | head -n1 | cut -d -f2`

[ -e /etc/apt/sources.list.orig ] || cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.orig

cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.tmp
sed "s,$OLD_SOURCE,$1," < /etc/apt/sources.list.tmp > /etc/apt/sources.list

The other answers, including the accepted answer, are no longer valid (for Ubuntu 11.04 and newer) because they recommended Debian packages such as netselect-apt and apt-spy which do not work with Ubuntu.

There are two different working answers to this question below:

1. 
   Use apt-get's mirror: method
   
   

   
   

   This method asks the Ubuntu server for a list of mirrors near you based on your IP, and selects one of them. The easiest alternative, with the minor downside that sometimes the closest mirror may not be the fastest.

   
   

   
   


2. 
   Command-line foo using netselect
   
   Shows you how to use the netselect tool to find the fastest recently updated servers from you -- network-wise, not geographically. Use sed to replace mirrors in sources.list.

Use sed to replace mirrors in sources.list

Since some sources use addition folders as part of their path it might be better to use the alternate separator syntax.

sudo sed -i 's%us.archive.ubuntu.com%mirrors.gigenet.com/ubuntuarchive/%' /etc/apt/sources.list

The easiest and efficient way to get the fastest mirror is to use the apt mirror:// source, see

https://mvogt.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/the-apt-mirror-method/