Solved/Enhancement: Fedora 11/Fedora 12 Speed Improvement for YUM updates

Context:
The typical mechanism for updating (or even upgrading) Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 distributions is through Yum and/or it's graphic user interface counter-part gpk-update-viewer. In brief, Yum collects local installation information and comparies it to available updates through a series of mirror sites holding updates for Fedora installations.


Problem:
While running a Beta version of Fedora 12, at some point most the mirror sites that provided Fedora 12 with updates stopped working for me. And, because these sites were scattered around the world, it took a while for Yum to look through all of them to find one that worked.


Constraints:
None


Details:
It's not clear why the mirror sites stopped working. Some reported "404" errors, some "50x" errors and some returned unknown result codes. Eventually, either by retrying or getting lucky, Yum would succeed. I suspect that as Fedora 12 beta moved to Fedora 12 official release, some testing sites for upgrades were taken down.

Note: this problem also affected the GUI front end for Yum: gpk-update-viewer.


Solution:

1. As an initial step, I executed su -c "yum clean all". I do not know it this assisted with the process of correcting the issue but it is worthy of noting.
2. Next I executed su -c "yum install yum-fastestmirror". After a few tries, the package as located and installed.

Results:
On the next yum action, I found the following output:

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, refresh-packagekit
Determining fastest mirrors
* fedora: fedora.xxxx.xxx
* updates: ftp.xxx.xxx
Setting up Update Process
...

Where the xxxx sites were geographically closer to my current location than the previous sites and were working as Yum expected. The completion of this Yum action and subsequent others was much faster and error free.


References:

• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/yum
  
• http://www.linuxcertif.com/man/1/gpk-update-viewer/
• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq#Instructions_to_upgrade_using_yum
• http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/fedora/updates/testing/9/ppc/yum-fastestmirror-1.1.15-1.fc9.noarch.html
  

Disclaimer
This solution worked for me. It may or may not work for you. I am not responsible for your actions nor your results of your actions should you act on what you read here. I do not claim expertise in this very specific area and only convey my experience. There is no warranty on this (and most) free information.