I find myself having to mirror bits of the SuSE install tree and updates quite often. The problem is I typically do not need all the .iso files, the src rpms and the debuginfo packages, so I use the command below to exclude them from my rsync:

*.iso
*-debuginfo-*
*/src/*
*-ar-*
*-ca-*
*-cs-*
*-da-*
*-de-*
*-el-*
*-es-*
*-et-*
*-fi-*
*-fr-*
*-hu-*
*-it-*
*-ja-*
*-ko-*
*-nl-*
*-pl-*
*-pt-*
*-ru-*
*-sk-*
*-sl-*
*-sv-*
*-tr-*
*-zh-*
*-af-*
*-bg-*
*-br-*
*-cy-*
*-en-*
*-eo-*
*-fo-*
*-ga-*
*-hr-*
*-is-*
*-nn-*
*-ro-*
*-nb-*

**hint:**You can paste the above list into a text file and pass it to rsync with the --exclude-from option

Also note that from the UK, I’ve found ftp.sh.cvut.cz to be a consistently fast mirror