Is there any way to make Flatpak downloads faster?

[anonnetuser]

Hi,

Is there any way to make Flatpak downloads faster? This is one of my top problems with Linux, in general, across all distros I tried since 2024. It's always the same. I'm getting kilobytes per second. I may see a spike of speed from time to time but overall it's abysmal. Installing KClock or KFind took over 10 minutes each, Freetube is going for over half an hour now. This is not usable. This was the same in Debian 12, Fedora 41/42 earlier this year and now Kubunutu 25. I never got a straight answer to this.

I'm in western Poland, APT and DNF fly as I'm close to a very fast local mirror and I get nearly 2 Gigabits downloads from it. Flatpak is absolutely horrible, I dislike it almost as much as Snap, although for different reasons. I'm on 2 Gigabit fiber and I live in the third or fourth largest city in the country. I can download a full Debian or Fedora ISO in less than 30 seconds. Am I just unlucky to be far from "something" or Flatpak is just a very bad system?

Google search returns many similar complaints and nothing is ever solved or even sufficiently explained.

Thank you!

[claydoh]

No, not really, as far as I can see, other than maybe trying a VPN to get you a different server in their pool. It doesn't look like they have a set of unique mirrors per se, though they do have a pool of servers.

It's not always slow for me, but it often is, since I moved to regional Australia and a slow metered mobile connection.
PPAs are much worse, as there really is no mirror network like Ubuntu's repos have, so when they have heave loads when someone is building a large number of packages, it slows to a crawl.

So, out of curiosity:
Here is the IP from my local connection in AUS:

$ ping dl.flathub.org
PING dualstack.n.sni.global.fastly.net (151.101.1.91) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 151.101.1.91: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=22.5 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.1.91: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=30.6 ms

And from my PC in the US, Savannah, Georgia:

$ ping dl.flathub.org
PING dl.flathub.org (151.101.129.91) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 151.101.129.91: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=301 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.129.91: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=291 ms​

Then from a Linode VPS located in Atlanta, Georgia:

ping -4 dl.flathub.org
PING dl.flathub.org (151.101.193.91) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 151.101.193.91: icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=0.640 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.193.91: icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=0.551 ms

Much different speeds with three different servers,

[anonnetuser]

Thank you. This a bummer. Looks like basically a system that wasn't designed properly. I've read it relies on some CDN, but that clearly isn't working well. It's usually slow for me, speed spikes are the exception. Maybe I'm spoiled by the super fast mirrors near me, but even a hundred MB/s would be usable as opposed to tens of KB/s that I normally get.

You don't download software that often, every day, but it makes setting up a new OS such a pain.

It's a bit quicker today, I'm getting 20-30 MB/s which is more usable, still installing something larger takes several minutes. That's how it was before with Fedora: unusable some days then better for a day and then bad again.

[jlittle]

FWIW, I'm in New Zealand, which I'd have thought would have a similar or less infrastructure as Poland, and my ping to dl.flathub.org is 7 ms, the same as my ISP and to Cloudflare DNS, from which I conclude they're all in the same data centre, or in data centres with very fast links. (Other data centres in other parts of the country get maybe 20 ms, and Australia 33 ms.)

[anonnetuser]

It was much faster in the morning, still only around 100MB/s but that was usable and so I was able to install all my software early in the day. By mid-afternoon it slowed down noticeably and by early evening I was getting kilobytes per seconds again and it remains unusable.

I noticed that Warehouse has an option to Install Packages, but I haven't looked into much as it.... freezes and then crashes when I try to mouse around its options

dl.flathub.org may be the global URL for the CDN they use and it resolves to a local node, that is closest to you. Maybe we just have a lousy CDN node in Poland. I don't even know what Flathub uses for the CDN.

[claydoh]

Fastly, I think.

[anonnetuser]

Fastly has a node in Frankfurt which should be very fast for me.

[claydoh]

No idea.

I wonder if deduplication has any effect on speed. I think that flatpak looks to see what is already present, and downloads only the things that aren't, so maybe this adds to the time?

Old but some parts are relevant:
https://barthalion.blog/not-seeing-t...for-the-trees/

So, using https is slower, and ostree is file-by file, not downloading a compressed archive, for deduplication. Just a random guess.




On a very slightly related note, I will be getting my fiber connection tomorrow! Err.... fibre. It is a school holiday here, and my not-fast mobile connection (metered) is noticeably slower this weekend.

[anonnetuser]

Nice Enjoy it!

[anonnetuser]

I went on to test few other distros for a few days and came back to Kubuntu 25 today and I can't install any Flatpaks at all this time.

Error:

Could not unmount revokefs-fuse filesystem at /var/tmp/flatpak-cache-MPPAE3/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default-FVG6D3: Child process exited with code 1

From quick googling it looks like a bug in Ubuntu/Kubuntu 25.10. This is discouraging to say the least. There must have been an update recently that nobody cared to test before releasing or only tested it with Snaps?

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/10/...0-apparmor-bug

There is a workaround:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...161/comments/5

But a system restart reverts it. So yeah, not cool. This makes me question whether Ubuntu/Kubuntu was the right pick as, unfortunately, many of my software is only available as Flatpaks.