Re: [Pan-devel] [patch] Accommodating Giganews users ( 20-50 connections)

[Rob]

On Monday 05 September 2011 12:40, Heinrich Müller wrote:
> I guess the only advantage of simultaneous connections would be
> if pan handled multiple downloads (multiple files) at the same time,
> which it doesn't atm.
> Perhaps in the future it will, who knows? ;)

Well, this is a practical consideration, not a theoretical one.  Pan may 
not support downloading multiple files at a time, but it does support 
downloading multiple parts of the same file at the same time, and the 
benefits are great.

As I posted on 5 July, using 4 connections resulted in a large file 
downloading twice as fast as with a single connection, and using 10 
connections was about 5 times faster.  I even did the single connection 
test last to eliminate any "news server caching articles and making later 
tests faster" issues.  So there's the advantage of simultaneous 
connections.  Maybe your test would be different, assuming you have a news 
server that supports multiple connections.  For me, multiple connections is 
markedly faster.

I haven't repeated the test with 20 or 50 connections, but since GNKSA's 
limit is 4, all I needed to do in order to show that GNKSA compliance is a 
bug was demonstrate that any n > 4 produced a significantly better result 
than n = 4.

Rob