[Pan-devel] Re: Connection limit...

[Duncan]

Mark Derricutt posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Sun, 24 Aug 2003 23:54:55 +1200:

> My airnews account only lets me have 3 connections, so that's what I've
> set in Pan, however occasionally I get an error saying "only 3 connections
> allowed" - so I'm guessing somewhere along the way Pan is creeping in
> another connection ( so I have it currently set at 2 ).

This is not uncommon with unreliable connections such as dialup, tho it
can be other problems as well (bad task scheduling on some OSs, or an
overloaded news server, for instance).  The problem is a connection that
dies without being shut down properly because the data got lost somewhere,
takes some time to time out on the server, and PAN may be trying to
reconnect b4 the server has timed out the dead one.  You can either live
with the reconnect errors, or set it to fewer connections.

Note that with the worms going around the last couple weeks, congestion is
likely worse than usual in spots, which would of course increase the
likelihood of a connection timeout..

However, given that you are on dialup, it's probably your pipe that's the
bottleneck anyway, so two connections should actually be better.  On
high speed connections such as my 3Mbps cable modem pipe, each connection
is likely to hit its cap if the server is capping that way, and the more
one can manage the higher the bandwidth and the faster things get
downloaded. That's where the four connections per server come in handy..

> Also - is there anyway to ratelimit pan's downloading of binaries?  Lately
> it seems to be taking all my ( poxy dialup ) bandwidth leaving nothing for
> browsing the web...

I don't believe there's a direct way, except by number of connections,
assuming, the available bandwidth per connection is lower than your pipe
bandwidth.  Of course, Linux and most decent OSs have traffic shaping
available in the kernel or network stack, if one should desire to use it.

BTW, your questions are probably more appropriate for the user list than
the developer list, since they don't have a lot to do with programming
PAN.  Please take that into account the next time you wish to ask some
questions.  I have no problem answering them, I'd just prefer to keep the
lists on topic, thus, to be answering them in the user list rather than
here on the devel list.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
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