If you’re finding yourself more frequently developing, testing or deploying infrastructure in EC2, and if perl is part of your stack, as it tends to be for library applications, then you’ve probably had occasion to ask “what CPAN hosts should I use?” Even a well scripted installation process will encounter that question unless CPAN has been configured, and unlike their internal RPM repository, Amazon doesn’t have their own CPAN mirror exposed or even a default target for their system images.
So you have to decide for yourself. And while you probably know your favorite hosts to use from your LAN, or from your old server room, the context has changed. Rather than pick randomly, I went ahead and measured speeds for downloading a small module. Here’s the 11 fastest mirrors with average response time:
0.080s http://ftp.wayne.edu/cpan/
0.908s ftp://mirror.cogentco.com/pub/CPAN/
1.193s http://mirror.cogentco.com/pub/CPAN/
1.712s ftp://mirror.cc.columbia.edu/pub/software/cpan/
1.727s http://mirror.metrocast.net/cpan/
1.943s http://cpan.dagolden.com/
2.453s ftp://cpan.mirrors.tds.net/pub/CPAN/
2.657s http://mirror.team-cymru.org/CPAN/
2.844s http://cpan.ezarticleinformation.com/
2.880s http://cpan.mirrors.tds.net/
3.232s http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/CPAN/
That’s for the US East (Virginia) region, ymmv.