We've been experiencing horrible download performance from oracle.com. Many downloads fail and accessing documentation from docs.oracle.com is a nightmare. It's not uncommon for documentation pages to take 1 or 2 minutes to load. That makes browsing documentation very painful.
Today it occurred to me the problems might be dependent on the location of the Oracle datacenter. A quick test revealed downloading all the stuff from the Washington area is 100% ok and using the default European datacenter is terrible.
Doing a DNS lookup for download.oracle.com gives 87.248.199.20 from our normal location in the EU. Resolving download.oracle.com from a US based client returns 208.111.133.52 or 208.111.133.53
I've added the following to my host file and all problems are gone:
208.111.133.52 download.oracle.com
Just wanted to let you all know you can try using the US/Washington address while Oracle is trying to fix the apparent problems in the European data center.