I was just wondering, tired of checking updates of apps on my N900, why nobody thought to create some kind of mirror for all maemo devices with the information if any of repositories were updated. The problem is when I'm executing apt-get update it takes couple of minutes even there weren't any updates. The idea is to create server which will check updates of all possible repositories, for example, every 15 minutes and wite down the result. Now the device (N900) makes query to this server, for example, once an hour (something like email checking) if there are any changes in repos. the query would be shorter in duration and much more smaller in data than updating repos. Than, if there any updates the notification should appear, and user may decide to execute apt-get update. I suppose it would reduce traffic bandwith produced by whole N900 users updating repos many times a day, not to mention the lack of checking for updates several times a day. It is just an idea. I don't know if I'm thinking in a right way, but I'd like to know your opinion guys

Which country do you live in? Supposedly the route between Australia and the repos is terrible, which is why I get 10kb/s over it.

Running apt through a US proxy is supposed to fix the problem.

I live in Poland. I can get ~160kb/s average download speed durning apt-get update, no matter what bandwidth is my internet connection (the best is about 50MBit -> 6Mb/s theoretically). Even update of all my repos is 150kb it takes couple of minutes, for me it is veeeery long and not power efficient(apt-get process eats lots of cpu). As I wrote in my earlier post, querying special server which knows wheter repos are updated or not, would take no longer tahn 10 sec and dozen of kb data traffic.
For you, having such weak download speed this improvement would be essential.

Yeah, I have a 100mbit connection so getting 10kb/s is terrible.

I live in Taiwan
I can get approximately 0~5mb/s
but I'm not sure if I use apt-get update will get how fast