Re: [Pan-users] Feature suggestion: limit connections per classes

[Duncan]

On Thu 29 May 2003 15:55, Johan Ovlinger posted as excerpted below:
> 
> Start with the rationale: I have a couple of _large_ multimedia groups
> that I read. alt.binaries.multimedia has close to 400K messages in it,
> and a couple of mp3 groups almost as many.
>
> I have a lot of RAM (768M) but even so, the system isn't very happy at
> all when I try to download headers for three large groups at the same
> time. Because the large groups take longer, they naturally tend to be
> updated at the same time.
>
> The natural way to limit this is to restrict to one or two connections
> when downloading headers, and ramp up to four for reading.  But this
> involves remembering to open the dialog... and I'm lazy.

I see your suggestion as probably more complicated to code than the benefit 
would be worth, but I'm not making those decisions, and perhaps it's easier 
than I'm thinking.

However, there is a work-around to your problem that should just take a bit of 
habit changing to make work decently reasonably.  First, make sure the get 
new headers (more correctly overviews, but anyway..) when starting PAN and 
when entering a group are off.  Then, simply enter the big groups one at a 
time and hit the d/l headers/overviews option for that group only.

FWIW, PAN must have gotten better lately than it was..  I have 512 meg RAM, 
and have had trouble with PAN and a SINGLE group with over 100k overviews, 
but I don't load that sort of group regularly, and the last time I did was 
some time ago when I was helping load test a server for the news admin here 
at Cox.  I know there've been several memory leaks and etc fixed in the 
changelogs for the various versions since then, but hadn't realized it was 
THAT much better (even if you DO have 768M).  Be glad PAN doesn't bring the 
system to its knees performance-wise with just ONE such group loaded and 
d/ling headers.  It did not all that long ago!

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