[Pan-users] Strange issue with missing headers when downloading new head
From:
Brian Costello
Subject:
[Pan-users] Strange issue with missing headers when downloading new headers...and a request
Date:
Tue, 10 Oct 2006 20:59:30 -0700
Hello,
I haven't looked into this issue as much as I'd like, but I was concerned that with 1.0 looming over the horizon, if I did all the necessary research to track down the problem definitively, I'd miss the chance to report a serious problem. Truthfully, I'm guessing it's something with my news provider, but maybe someone who has the NNTP protocol fresher in their mind than I do will be able to provide some meaningful insight...
In the last few Pan versions (I haven't seen it in .116 yet), I've noticed missing headers when updating large groups with the "get new headers in selected groups". If I go back and re-download the last n headers, the missing headers will show up. The two explanations I can think of for this phenominon are: 1) My news provider (astraweb), who is round robining their news servers via DNS, isn't properly synchronizing their news servers -or- 2) Pan is losing headers.
If I remember my NNTP (and I probably don't), each group gave your news reader a numeric article number which your client used to determine how many new articles were available. If a news provider's numbers were out of sync, the news reader would either re-download headers, or it would miss headers. I suppose I could write a program that would open a connection to each of the news servers in parallel, request the header info on a particular group, and see if they're all the same number - and if not, change providers. I was just curious if anyone had experienced this problem with a different provider.
Now for the request: I think pan could use some feature that would keep multiple copies of Pan from running at the same time. Admittedly, this is a "protect you from yourself" type of mod, but it seems to me that there's never a good reason to have two instances of Pan open at the same time. On a different PC, I once started two instances of Pan at different times, updated headers for a group on each instance, THEN shut down one instance. When I was shutting down my PC, I noticed the other instance, which got closed and messed up the header count (at least). That seemed to screw things up (understandably). Is there something that can be
Anyway, thank you very much for all the recent improvements to Pan - it was memory conscious before that recent 60% savings ... now it uses around 1/3 of the memory my old news client used to use :) Gotta love it.