TCP settings ?

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xtrips
Posts: 28
Joined: Mon Mar 10, 2003 3:37 pm

TCP settings ?

Post by xtrips »

:?: As you guys probably know, other softs like NewsBin Pro have some settings for the TCP/Ip window size for exemple.
No question NewsPro is a much more powerful engine considering its filters and search tools, its priority settings and customizable interface.
But, I could clearly notice a difference of performance in NewsBin when changing those settings.
So I am wondering if there is any equivalent in NewsPro ?
Or in a more general way, is there any thing i can do to optimize NewsPro to my available bandwidth ( ADSL 1.5 Mbits downstream ) ?

At the moment I am not too happy with my download speed in NewsPro compared to NewsBin and I am pretty sure the reason is hidden somewhere in the settings.

THX
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Post by alex »

I know, there was one user complaining that newspro doesn't have an option like 'purge connections' something like that (another "tcp" option, you should know), so even after newspro exit you see in netstat connections left, the user wronly linked that the the too many connections message coming from the server while the netstat shows sockets in the process of closing (just the system handles all that even after application exit). I checked the issue, there is a winsock function to ungracefully shutdown a socket, but it affects only the client machine, it just resets socket data structures on the client end - on the server end it is the same as if you switched off the computer so it doesn't affect the server, even worse if the connection was supposed to close but you just invoked the function - the close won't be in fact performed since your computer just forgets about the connection. Thus the option is at least unnecessary.

As to the size of the TCP window, I checked the issue now - the size is set on the system level for all connections so for certain the option doesn't change the tcp windows size, what it does is changing the size of receive and send buffers, most sources I found tell that it doesn't matter unless you set them too small. I'll try to check the issue further, I mean where there is one useless option, it may be the same case with this one. What change buffer size option does - it calls setsockopt (winsock function) and sets SO_RCVBUF, the documentation remarks are "Specifies the total per-socket buffer space reserved for receives. This is unrelated to SO_MAX_MSG_SIZE or the size of a TCP window." If you don't see the difference when you set the buffer size (or whatever it is called there) to 16K or more - it does nothing.

As to article tasks (downloading bodies) I don't see any reason why downloading speed could be limited, you may try to uncheck properties->tasks, below normal priority for network threads, as to header tasks you also may try to increase thresholds or disable (the latter may backfire) in properties->tasks->hard tasks, prevent overload.
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