Re: [Pan-devel] Hacking pan for Giganews

[Conrad J. Sabatier]

On Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:40:37 -0700
walt <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 08/09/2011 02:35 PM, Conrad J. Sabatier wrote:
> > Hi.  I'm in the process of hacking the pan source code to take
> > fuller advantage of my Giganews Diamond account (50 connections!,
> > whoo boy!).
> > 
> > I've already modified pan/gui/server-ui.cc to allow me to set the
> > server's config to 50 connections (that part was easy), but I'm
> > looking now for how to hack pan's task management to do more
> > simultaneous header downloads, binary file saves, etc.
> > 
> > Can anyone point me in the right direction?  I'll send back to the
> > list anything I come up with, if anyone's interested.
> 
> Hi Conrad, and welcome to the pan mailing list.  (Forgive my senility
> if you've posted here before :)

Thank you, and no, I'm new to this list.  :-)

> I'll answer your question with two questions :p
> 
> I've read many threads, in this group and elsewhere, about the
> utility of multiple connections to a server.  I've never been
> satisfied with any of the explanations I've seen so far -- but I've
> never used a server that allowed more than four connection, so what
> do I know?
> 
> What is the speed of your internet connection to giganews, and do they
> limit the bandwidth of any single connection to their servers?

There does seem to be some bandwidth limiting on a per-connection
basis, yes, roughly in the 70-100 KBps range.  But combining all of the
connections together, Pan shows an average total bandwidth in the
neighborhood of 2000+ KBps.  I've even seen some bursts in the
neighborhood of 3000+.  Not bad, eh?

> Second, when you download multiple posts/headers from multiple groups,
> etc, how many individual download icons do you see in the status bar
> at the bottom of the pan window?

If I'm doing any header downloads (regardless of what other tasks may
be queued), then I generally see only a single task in progress at a
time, occasionally two or more if the the header fetches are
brief, although for the longer fetches the single currently running task
does seem to be employing all of my connections.  On article download
and decoding tasks, I've seen a maximum of about 6 tasks running at any
given time.  I'd like to increase the number of simultaneous header
downloads (i.e., do more than one group at a time) as well as the
number of tasks in general (I'm on a quad core machine, so I think I
can handle it), if possible, and reduce the number of connections used
by any given task accordingly, dividing up the total number of
connections as judiciously as possible among the currently running
number of tasks.

Does that make any sense?  :-)  Does it even sound feasible, given
pan's current design?  Or would this involve a radical change in the
overall design?  Or maybe I'm totally misinterpreting how pan is
currently functioning?  :-)

Thanks for replying.

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier
address@hidden