Hi guys, CentOS 5.10 is currently being synced to mirrors.
While monitoring the synchronization status, I noticed that there are a number of mirrors that apparently don't use the -H flag to preserve hard links. Using that flag would have multiple benefits:
1) Reduced hard disk space. Some i386 packages are also present in the x86_64 tree. These are hard links with their counterparts in the i386 directory. By using the hard links, those files would need to be stored only once on your hard disk.
2) Faster sync times at release. Almost every package in 5.10 is already in a 5.9 directory -- either cr, fasttrack, os or updates. Those not using the rsync -H flag will now need to download the 5.10 os RPMs, instead of just making more hard links to the already existing files. Obviously this does not apply to the .iso files, those will need to be downloaded in any case.
3) Bandwidth consumption would also be reduced, both from your side and from the CentOS msync service side. The msync servers are under a very heavy burden at release times, therefore anything that reduces the traffic would help everyone.
For reference: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/CreatePublicMirrors