Re: [Pan-users] Feature Idea - Download Priority By Posting Date

[Duncan]

On Sun 04 May 2003 10:09, Brad Sims posted as excerpted below:
> Is it currently possible to have more than four connections at once?
> IIRC Giganews allows 8 connections...

The answer to that one is conditional...

One of the GNKSA conditions that PAN observes is that connections per server 
should be limited to four, to prevent DoSing the server.  GNSKA, as you 
likely realize if you've ever read the PAN site, is a pretty high priority 
with the developers, and IMO rightly so, so this isn't likely to be changed 
in shipping versions any time soon.

That said, there are two ways around that, one for those that don't mind doing 
their own patches and recompilation, the other for those that choose to stick 
to pre-compiled binaries.

For those that don't mind applying their own patches, Charles has even 
mentioned specifically what to change, and where.  This came up not all that 
long ago, so the message should still be fresh in the archive...  I found it.  
Try the "Virtuell newsgroups and concurrent connections" thread, Charles' 
post in it back on April 22.  Of course, the catch is you have to reapply the 
patch each time you upgrade PAN, since, again, that's NOT going to make it 
into the official sources.

For those that prefer to stick to pre-compiled binaries, RPM packages or 
whatever, the work-around is both simple and not ideal, but it's there, for 
those that want it.  Simply create a second server as far as PAN is 
concerned, but set it up for the same real server address.  Each server can 
then have four connections.  The reason that this isn't ideal is it 
reintroduces the pre-gnet problem of having to set up downloads separately to 
keep all connections going, but at least this way you only have to manage two 
sets, rather than many.

There are in fact several ways you could go about this, but they boil down to 
variations on two basic approaches.  One, if you have two nominally distinct 
areas of interest, both of which include heavy binary activity, and more or 
less equally divided as far as d/ls, you could categorize activity per 
server, putting, say, electronic and dance mp3 groups on one server, and 
mainline rock groups on the other.  

Two, if the two areas are to unequally divided to make that efficient, or you 
don't want to do it that way, set up the same groups in both PAN servers.  
Then do what I did back b4 gnet -- start one d/l going top to bottom, the 
other going bottom to top, with the sorts the same in both.  They will meet 
somewhere in the middle, and won't d/l the ones the other has d/led when they 
realize that msg-id is already in the cache.  Of course, on the messages 
where they actually meet, there will be a single-message duplication, as the 
first will have started d/ling the message but not finished it when the 
second gets to it, but other than that single message duplicated (for each 
thread, so four message parts d/led twice for all four threads going on both 
servers), it will then see the rest are d/led and skip over them.  Of course, 
that means you have to half the estimated time to completion of the task, 
since you are attacking it from both ends, but that's not a big problem, in 
general.

Thus, until PAN gets that new back-end database and all those fancy features 
mentioned up-thread, it's a bit of manual work getting more than four 
connections going at once, but it's easily possible.

..  Here on Cox, which has pretty decent news servers for an ISP, they have 
three servers, each limited to four connections @ 384kbps each.  Thus, each 
server will serve up to 1.5Mbps utilizing all four connections, but users can 
connect to two or three servers if desired, to fill up their 3Mbps capped 
cable modem pipes.  Anyway, with the Cox servers, I can't utilize more than 
the four connection to a server anyway, but I CAN do as outlined above, only 
connecting to REALLY different servers, to fill my 3Mbps bandwidth.  However, 
I seldom do that, as I find 1.5Mbps generally adequate for my needs, when 
balancing time d/ling against hassle setting it up.  Still, it's nice to have 
the ability if I decide I want to use it.

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin