I continue to see reports of downloads stalling and then showing dramatic improvements after a restart. I'm skeptical. I have not been able to reproduce the alleged bug recently: when I leave the node running overnight, I come back and I see that downloads are progressing, admittedly slowly. However I have a theory:
On restart, every persistent request is started again from 0%. Because almost all files are splitfiles, it has to fetch the top of the splitfile first. This means it will start at 0% and, assuming it's fetched this part successfully before, rapidly progress towards 100% (because it's only fetching a few blocks, which are all in the datastore anyway). Then it will jump back to where it was, and make much slower progress, because it's now fetching the real data. If I am right, we need to make it a lot more obvious when a percentage is provisional (i.e. when it's likely we are going to add more blocks once this layer is fetched). We could maybe add a layer/stage indicator, either as a number or as a color? My apologies to all you who have reported this bug, it's entirely possible that there is a real download stalling bug, I'm just pondering a possible explanation - does it fit with your experience? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20080329/2ebd654e/attachment.pgp>
