HTTP_mirror_pool.md

@@ -8,6 +8,56 @@
 
 See the corresponding [design document](https://tails.boum.org/contribute/design/mirrors).
 
+<a id="2021"></a>
+
+# Improve UX and lower maintenance cost (2021)
+
+## Current problems
+
+Our current mirror pool, and how we use and maintain it, has several major
+problems.
+
+### UX
+
+#### Robustness
+
+Users face errors while downloading or upgrading Tails.
+
+Some mirrors are regularly broken, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for days:
+they're maintained by volunteers on their spare time and have no
+high-availability setup.
+
+Our software is not resilient to broken mirrors:
+
+ - tails#15755
+ - tails#17615
+
+#### Performance
+
+Some mirrors are probably slow enough that they're the bottleneck when
+downloading or upgrading Tails, even over Tor.
+
+### Release Management
+
+Delays in sync'ing new data from our rsync server adds delay
+to the release process. This is caused by:
+
+- Some mirrors are slow to sync'.
+- Our pool includes many mirrors that are competing for the 1Gbps uplink
+  of our rsync server.
+
+### Maintenance of the pool of mirrors
+
+Maintaining the pool is:
+
+- tedious and repetitive work: there's very often temporary mirror breakage
+  to check and possibly handle
+- time-sensitive, and thus stressful: due to the combination of "our software
+  is not resilient to broken mirrors" and "there's often a broken mirror",
+  any breakage impacts UX negatively
+
+## The plan
+
 # Initial research
 
 See [archive](HTTP_mirror_pool/archive).
@@ -93,4 +143,3 @@ process doc)
 * merge the doc branch for mirror operators into tails.git
 * merge the updated design doc branch into tails.git
 * merge the branch into puppet-tails.git
-