I've been playing around with Linux VMs, and encountered this problem updating via pacman in ArchLinux. Here's the error message that kept popping up:
error: failed retrieving file 'extra.db' from "insertMirrorNameHere" : Operation too slow. Less than 1 bytes/sec transferred the last 10 seconds
The solution I found basically said to try updating the mirror list to try pulling from other mirrors... Since I prefer to work smarter (not harder), and someone else has already put in the elbow grease, I used an existing automated tool to do this (see: Reflector) The fix for me required the following sequence of commands:
First, I had to install Reflector.
sudo pacman -S reflector
Made a backup of my old mirrolist.
sudo mv /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.bak
And finally, reflector filters the first 20 mirrors, sorts by download rate, and saves the result to /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.
sudo reflector --verbose -l 20 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Then I tried to update again using sudo pacman -Syu. I still got a couple of the same error messages -- apparently at least one of my new mirrors was still timing out. However, pulling from different mirrors allowed the pacman operation to complete successfully despite a couple stray error messages.
Now the next time this happens I won't have to dig up instructions again.
:-)
Cover photo: Beraldo Leal / CC BY