For what easy_install does, there really isn't any dynamic API usage, so a static mirror for easy_install could take a good bit of load off the cheeseshop. I don't know whether this will actually solve any problems the cheeseshop itself is having; it may be that ill-behaved web spiders are at fault, or something else altogether. However, since the downtime mostly creates issues for people using easy_install, creating a solution for those people certainly seems worthwhile. Since easy_install was designed to be able to use simple directory indexes and HTML pages as a package index, it should be possible to create a simple directory tree of HTML pages, using PyPI's public XML-RPC API. The mirror could use PyPI's RSS feed to know when a package's information is out of date, although I'm not sure that the RSS includes all modifications, such as when packages are deleted, releases are hidden, files uploaded, etc. However, assuming that there's a scalable way to receive change notifications, it should be straightforward to implement a mirror script for easy_install, and have it run on one or more volunteered hosts, perhaps with round-robin DNS (maybe easy-install.python.org?) I'll be happy to assist anyone who wants to work on this, including updates to easy_install itself, of course. I'd actually be hacking on this now, if the cheeseshop weren't down (i.e., I can't download any XML-RPC data to do prototyping at the moment!)