Usenet Explorer

I would like to see an option to set retention server based.

I have 2 newsservers, a paid one and the one from my ISP.
The paid one has 30 days retention and the ISP one has 2 days.

Now if I choose to download posts that are older then 2 days the 3 threads I have for my ISP server spend half a day trying to connect and download.
But because the server only has 2 days retention I know beforehand that there are a lot of posts my ISP server doesn't have.

At the moment I can't find a way to let my ISP threads skip the posts I know the server doesn't have.
If I would be able to set retention server based UE could do this automagically for me.

if you sort the queue by date so the ISP server will have chance to download everything first there should be no problem then, since estabilishing connection doesn't take much resources and there is always enough supply to feed your isp server since rejecting articles happens faster than downloading, so the ISP server is not a problem here.

just imagine how many times more options we would need if to adopt the program for every possible configuration, not even mentioning i would run out of time before all.

only if you use expensive in RAM article number or message-id newsgroup destination types the program will know which articles every server has so it will be able to download them like you want.

in netherlands i heard some ISPs have decent newsservers with the retention of the order like newshosting.

alex wrote:if you sort the queue by date so the ISP server will have chance to download everything first there should be no problem then, since estabilishing connection doesn't take much resources and there is always enough supply to feed your isp server since rejecting articles happens faster than downloading, so the ISP server is not a problem here.

I have it sorted by date and it did spent allmost half a day trying to download posts I knew the server wouldn't have.

alex wrote:n netherlands i heard some ISPs have decent newsservers with the retention of the order like newshosting.

I only know of XS4All having a decent retention but they miss a lot of the binary groups. I've had a subscription with them.

I quote your other message here as well so we won't keep the same topic along several threads:

Well, you don't need to check earliest file date on the server if you combine Dryheat's and my wish.
He kinda asked for the same thing I did.

You know the retention your server has and what's wanted is some option to set how many days it has.
Now all UE has to do is check the dates of the files you want to download, then check if according to the retention set it is in the timerate and try to download. If it exceeds the retention set by the user it simply discards it for the server.
There should be no server querying involved in determining this.

my logic is as following.

your server with limited retention can take half day trying to download articles which it doesn't have. the real question is whether it influences performance, bandwidth or download speed and the answer looks like "no" when the queue is sorted by date.

the reason is (i repeat it again):

you have a queue sorted by date. the most recent articles go to the top of the queue so they will be downloaded by the isp server right away.

then the isp server will start reject articles and they go to the pay server instead. the speed of rejecting will be faster than the pay server will be able to download the bodies and the bandwidth consumption on rejecting articles is very small, so you have a good supply for the pay server while it happens.

it only doesn't cover the case, when your isp server is slow and you want to make its preference strict then the pay server will wait until the isp server will download the recent articles first, but if the isp server is fast it is even preferrable the isp server will be used at the full speed since articles there expire much faster.

so why you are so worried about your isp server rejecting articles if it doesn't cost you anything in performance, bandwidth or download speed? is your bandwidth saturated at all times?

if to set artificial limit on the server e.g. text newsgroups may have a different retention, then we need more options, and per newsgroup/server pair retention would be like a table, so we will be delving into infinite options when there are reasonable setting configurations which will work now well without the burden of additional settings.