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I assumed that the TeX Live Manager would pick random mirrors if you didn't specify one (or random within the same continent or such). When I asked a question about this @cfr thought it would automatically pick the fastest mirror. What does the TeX Live Manager for Windows actually do?

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Canageek
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    See https://www.ctan.org/mirrors where the structure is explained: the address http://mirror.ctan.org points to a multiplexor that chooses one of the official mirrors, according to some criterion depending on the network topology. Mirrors are monitored, so slow or inactive ones can be excluded, see https://www.ctan.org/mirrors/mirmon – egreg Jan 11 '16 at 23:32

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What tlmgr actually does is explained in egreg's answer partially:

  • it connects to mirror.ctan.org and asks for a mirror
  • it extracts the actual mirror address from the html response
  • it uses this (the same) address for all operations of this run

The additional two steps are done to ensure that in one run of tlmgr all connections are to the same server, and not to different servers in case there is a time squeeze of syncronization.

On the mirror.ctan.org an IP-country based approach is used to determine a supposedly close mirror.

In addition we do have a list of mirrors that can be selected during installation, which is updated every week.

norbert
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    Country based? THAT explains a lot. There are only a few Canadian mirrors, and at least one is on the far side of the continent from me. – Canageek Jan 28 '16 at 21:19
  • @Canagreek don't take my word for granted what the mirroring service is actually doing, I'm not operating it. – norbert Jan 28 '16 at 21:21
  • Ah, so we'd need to ask the TeX Live people for that. – Canageek Jan 28 '16 at 21:24
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    no, the mlctan mirroring service is not managed by TeX Live. I know the TeX Live part, but the CTAN part is separate. – norbert Jan 28 '16 at 21:25