Usenet Explorer

I have an very slow internet connection, it takes hours to download a CD's worth of data. On the plus side, this makes me very careful in what I download, but on the minus side, it makes doing a long-term header get/rescan just too painful. I have my various groups spread out time-wise, and I run with UE set to not start download tasks while its doing header gets, otherwise one set of "gets" might not finish before the next started.

On many groups, I have deletion set to "natural" since Giganews has such a long retention time. ...but its not forever, so I'd occasionally like to reconfirm the whole set of headers - a rescan. With my slow internet connection this would literally take several days for just one news group.

What I was thinking would be a "background" header get and/or rescan. It would run only occasionally so as to not hog the connection, maybe something like get a packet, wait ten seconds, repeat. It would have to be time based otherwise the normal article tasks would never let it in. The actual time to run and time to wait between runs could be tunable between running constantly, and enough so that the server doesn't give up. That is, the "dial" would tune how far in the background the task would run. Maybe it could also monitor other UE tasks and if nothing was going on, dial itself up as long as there was no other activity.

I don't want these to replace the normal header gets, just an option to run.

What do you say Alex?

Larry

There was also a request to sync downloads.

I may need to work first on search service since synchronizing headers would be useful there as well given the latest trends on usenet provider side.

Some time between v4.1 and v4.2 I've made search service to be compiled within v4.x project (before that search service code was compiled using v3.x project), hopefully I'll get through with the rest rather sooner than later, so it will be the time to add smaller features.