Author Topic: Allow threads to download specific items in download queue  (Read 2831 times)

FacELesS

  • Guest
Allow threads to download specific items in download queue
« on: June 05, 2007, 09:33:03 pm »
An option that allows the thread you choose (eg. thread #3) download a specific item, whether it is ontop of the download queue or not, effectively allowing you to download multiple items on the download queue at the same time.

Example:
I have two downloads in my queue: #A and #B.
#A is ontop of my queue. I then choose thread #1 and #2 of the 5 threads to download #B while the other 3 threads (#3-#5) downloads as normal from the top of the queue, which would be #A.
If #B finishes before #A, thread #1 and #2 (which was downloading #B) would return to downloading was is ontop of the queue, which would be #A.
If #A finishes before #B, thread #3 to #5 would continue as normal and download what is ontop of the queue, being #B.

Pedro

  • Guest
Allow threads to download specific items in download queue
« Reply #1 on: June 09, 2007, 09:45:26 pm »
I am very curious why you would like to do this?
What is the advantage over downloading them sequentially?

FacELesS

  • Guest
Allow threads to download specific items in download queue
« Reply #2 on: June 16, 2007, 04:56:07 pm »
My situation might be quite unique (in a global sense), because of the current telecomunications environment in South Africa. Telkom's (our monopolistic telecoms provider) prices for international bandwidth are some of the highest in the world, and in comparrison local bandwidth (anything transmitted to and from within out borders) is 20 times cheaper.

Our local news server caches articles as we download them through the local news server. This counts as local bandwidth for us, but uncached articles downloads at a slow speed of 6-16KB/s. If the articles we download are chached we achieve the max speed of our connection, which is currently around 420KB/s for me.

The high cost of international bandwidth makes downloading from quicker news servers like giganews extremely expensive, considering that it costs us around $11US per gig for international data compared to $0.60US per gig for local data.

Because of this situation it would speed things up for me, and many other South African users, if we were able to choose that 2 threads downloads a file that is cached, while 3 threads continues with a file that is unchached.