I have been having this problem sporadically for some weeks now, mostly
for an hour or two after 20:00 UTC (very approximately).

When I ask zypper to apply Patches and/or Updates, retrieving one
repository's metadata takes over 30 minutes. I think the repository in
question is "SUSE Linux Enterprise 15" (I'm running Leap 15.3) and as
far as I can see, it is always the same one.
If I run the KDE updater, I can't see which repository is the problem
but there is no reason to suppose it is not the usual candidate.

Last night an update of the Kernel took at least 50 minutes, although it
was done by the Updater under KDE so all I could see was that it was
refreshing the database for an age. Under normal circumstances it
should take around 90-120 seconds from start to finish.
This is not a problem with the network, other network traffic was
running normally at the time.
Retrieving the actual package updates appears to run at the normal speed.

Is anyone else observing this?
Is killing the update process while it is trying to retrieve the
metadata an option?

On 20/01/2022 13.10, Andrew wrote:
> I have been having this problem sporadically for some weeks now, mostly
> for an hour or two after 20:00 UTC (very approximately).
>
> When I ask zypper to apply Patches and/or Updates, retrieving one
> repository's metadata takes over 30 minutes.  I think the repository in
> question is "SUSE Linux Enterprise 15" (I'm running Leap 15.3) and as
> far as I can see, it is always the same one.
> If I run the KDE updater, I can't see which repository is the problem
> but there is no reason to suppose it is not the usual candidate.

Today I had a problem when trying to update using YaST, it was very
slow. So I went and had a look at the end of the log file,
/var/log/YaST2/y2log, which told me exactly what mirror it was actually
using to download the current file. One in China, and I am in Spain.

I asked, and apparently that file was very new and that was the only
mirror that had the file that minute.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

Carlos E.R. wrote:
> On 20/01/2022 13.10, Andrew wrote:
>> I have been having this problem sporadically for some weeks now,
>> mostly for an hour or two after 20:00 UTC (very approximately).
>>
>> When I ask zypper to apply Patches and/or Updates, retrieving one
>> repository's metadata takes over 30 minutes.  I think the repository
>> in question is "SUSE Linux Enterprise 15" (I'm running Leap 15.3) and
>> as far as I can see, it is always the same one.
>> If I run the KDE updater, I can't see which repository is the problem
>> but there is no reason to suppose it is not the usual candidate.
>
> Today I had a problem when trying to update using YaST, it was very
> slow. So I went and had a look at the end of the log file,
> /var/log/YaST2/y2log, which told me exactly what mirror it was actually
> using to download the current file. One in China, and I am in Spain.
>
> I asked, and apparently that file was very new and that was the only
> mirror that had the file that minute.
>

Your problem was downloading a package, mine was unloading the metadata
to see what was available.
You are implying that the mirror in China is updated first - late in the
evening (CET) - so zypper grabs the metadata from there?

On 27/01/2022 10.26, Andrew wrote:
> Carlos E.R. wrote:
>> On 20/01/2022 13.10, Andrew wrote:
>>> I have been having this problem sporadically for some weeks now,
>>> mostly for an hour or two after 20:00 UTC (very approximately).
>>>
>>> When I ask zypper to apply Patches and/or Updates, retrieving one
>>> repository's metadata takes over 30 minutes.  I think the repository
>>> in question is "SUSE Linux Enterprise 15" (I'm running Leap 15.3) and
>>> as far as I can see, it is always the same one.
>>> If I run the KDE updater, I can't see which repository is the problem
>>> but there is no reason to suppose it is not the usual candidate.
>>
>> Today I had a problem when trying to update using YaST, it was very
>> slow. So I went and had a look at the end of the log file,
>> /var/log/YaST2/y2log, which told me exactly what mirror it was
>> actually using to download the current file. One in China, and I am in
>> Spain.
>>
>> I asked, and apparently that file was very new and that was the only
>> mirror that had the file that minute.
>>
>
> Your problem was downloading a package, mine was unloading the metadata
> to see what was available.

Actually, I had the problem when downloading the metadata and packages.

2022-01-26 14:14:46 <1> Telcontar(10364) [zypp::media++]
MediaCurl.cc(doGetFileCopyFile):1018 URL:
http://download.opensuse.org/update/leap/15.3/sle/repodata/c75bbe7661a40e64c22ce7489aa4bef078c9bd0e9e099a5e2e1a1950da8902cb-primary.xml.gz
2022-01-26 14:14:46 <1> Telcontar(10364) [zypp++]
CurlHelper.cc(log_redirects_curl):105 redirecting to Location:
http://mirrors.hit.edu.cn/opensuse/update/leap/15.3/sle/repodata/c75bbe7661a40e64c22ce7489aa4bef078c9bd0e9e099a5e2e1a1950da8902cb-primary.xml.gz

> You are implying that the mirror in China is updated first - late in the
> evening (CET) - so zypper grabs the metadata from there?

It just happened that this server was the first to grab the update, and
the only one for a while. And this is a fact, an admin looked it up for
me. Not that this or any server is updated first every time.

Fifteen minutes later, same operations went fast as normal.

The point is, if you consistently have slow downloads, look up in the
log which server it is and report (not here).

--
Cheers, Carlos.