Optimized sourceslist
In short, fancy efforts to create an optimized sources.list did not produce a significant improvement for me from a location in the USA. I manually chose a nearby site using apt-setup.
apt-spy creates sources.list automatically, based on latency and bandwidth. netselect-apt creates a more complete sources.list, but uses an inferior method of choosing the best mirror (ping time comparison).
# apt-get install apt-spy # cd /etc/apt ; mv sources.list sources.list.org # apt-spy -d testing -l sources.apt