Re: [Pan-users] Re: Post-to server distinct from posted-to newsgroup?

[Rhialto]

On Fri 17 Nov 2006 at 23:45:42 +0000, Jack Cuyler wrote:
> What if you added a pay server to the mix, one that carries most of the
> groups your ISP carries, but not all, and some that your ISP doesn't? 
> Currently, pan will get articles from both the pay server and your ISP,
> giving preference according to how you rank them, making the article list
> as complete as possible.  To which server should pan post when a group is
> carried by multiple servers?

I was thinking about this a bit, and about download strategies, and I
came to the conclusion that Pan doesn't even need to know which articles
exist on which server, it just need to know which articles exist at all
(by message-id, which I presume it keeps already).

Why?

Suppose you have 2 servers, a primary that is fast but a bit slow to
update its article list (or just a bit slow to receive the articles),
and a secondary server that is slow/pay/etc. Now if you're downloading
the very newest articles, you may see them appear first on the secondary
server, but by the time you get around to downloading any one particular
article it may have appeared on the primary server without Pan knowing
it yet. So, when fetching an article by message-id, it can/should just
ask for it first on the primary server, just in case it has it. So,
there is no need for Pan to keep track of on which servers it saw any
particular article.

(note: I didn't check if this is actually the way Pan works, I am just
indicating how I think it could work; maybe this can be used).

(on the other hand, if Pan does keep track of this information, I'd like
to see it, for instance to know which multipart articles are complete
using only the primary server, that sort of info)

(another aside: if a multipart article is being downloaded but not
complete yet, is it guaranteed that all parts remain in cache? This
matters for instance if it takes a long time for the last parts to come
in from a slow server and therefore a whole bunch of multiparts are
active at the same time)

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert      -- You author it, and I'll reader it.
\X/ rhialto/at/xs4all.nl        -- Cetero censeo "authored" delendum esse.