Its at times like these that you gotta have Friends.  Of Eclipse that is.  Friends of Eclipse.  While I congratulate the entire Eclipse team for releasing 3.4.2 and I applaud the community for its fast uptake.  But really. All this downloading is getting in the way of other people.

Until today I was a lapsed friend.  But then I decided I needed yesterday’s integration build. Being no longer blessed with living inside the IBM firewall and having access to “fullmoon”, I had to go to the main eclipse.org server for the file.  Well, me and 110% of all the other people in the world apparently.  Just getting a 20MB file was going to take 30min. I had several downloads fail.  Frustrating. But wait, a lifeline is at hand.

The Friends of Eclipse program allows the community to both show their support for Eclipse and get a bit extra.  The extra in this case is special Friends QoS rules for download.eclipse.org. What’s that mean? For me it meant the difference between 9kb/s and 688kb/s. Or, for the temporally inclined, 37 minutes to download my file vs. 37 seconds. As Denis puts it, “thats 35 bucks well spent”.

Are you a…

Related posts:

• I get by with a little help from my friends.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•