Need For Speed? Find The Fastest Debian Mirror in 5 Easy Steps

If you want to boost your Debian speed, we show you how to find the fastest Debian mirror in simple steps. Debian is known for its stability, reliability, and powerful package management system. However, you may sometimes face slow download speeds when fetching packages and updates from the default repositories. For this purpose, you can use Debian mirrors. A Debian mirror is a copy of the official Debian repository hosted on a server that is geographically distributed to optimize download speeds. By using a Debian mirror, you can experience faster package downloads and updates.

In this guide, we use a simple tool called netselect-apt. It will automatically select the fastest Debian mirror from a list of mirrors available in the sources.list file. This tool helps you optimize your package downloads and updates by configuring your system to use the mirror with the lowest latency.

You can now follow the steps below to find the fastest Debian mirror.

Boost Your Debian Speed: Find The Fastest Debian Mirror

To find the fastest Debian mirror, you need to run the Linux Commands as a root or non-root user with sudo privileges. Here our Debian version is Debian 12, you can check the Debian 12 initial setup guide for this purpose.

Then, follow the steps below to install the netselect-apt tool and start to use it.

Step 1 – Install netselect-apt Tool on Debian

First, you must run the system update by using the following command:

sudo apt update

Then, run the following command to install the netselect-apt package on your Debian server:

sudo apt install netselect-apt -y

Once your installation is completed, proceed to the next step to start finding the fastest Debian mirror by using the netselect-apt tool.

Step 2 – Discover the Fastest Debian Mirror for Your sources.list

At this point, you must run the netselect-apt command without any option:

netselect-apt

This command will search and select the fastest mirror based on current network conditions, and scan for the optimal server that can deliver the quickest download speeds for updates and installations.

Also, it will generate a file where you execute the command and the results include the best mirrors that you can use.

Example Output:

Step 3 – Search for the Fastest Mirror by Specifying the Debian Release

The different releases may be hosted on different mirrors, so you can search for the mirrors by specifying your Debian release. In this case, we use Debian 12 Bookworm. The command looks like this:

netselect-apt -n bookworm

Example Output:

Step 4 – Customize the Debian Mirror Search

Also, you can customize your search by specifying your Debian architecture, the region, comparing results, and version releases like testing, stable, or unstable. For example:

netselect-apt -c us -t 15 -a amd64 -n stable

Example Output:

Step 5 – Backup and Update Debian Source List

Once your search is finished, it is recommended to back up your source list first. To do this, run the command below:

cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup

Then, copy your fastest mirror file to the source list:

cp sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list

Now run the system update to apply the changes:

sudo apt update

Note: Remember to execute the commands in the terminal where you ran the netselect-apt command.

That’s it, you are done. This will help you to speed up your package updates and installations.

Summing Up

At this point, you have learned to install and use netselect-apt tool on Debian. This tool helps you to search and find the fastest Debian mirror and boost your Debian speed. Hope you enjoy using it.

Also, you may like to read the following articles:

Check Internet Speed in Linux Terminal

Enable TCP BBR on Centos 7

Upgrade Bash in Debian and Ubuntu