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RE: NNW interfering with other downloads in low-bandwidth environment

betalogue — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:14:00 GMT

Brent -- thanks for your reply. I understand that there are a number of things that beyond your control (and mine) and I cannot say I am surprised to hear that there's not much you can do.

That said, I cannot help but feel that, compared to its actual bandwidth requirements (i.e. the amount of data that it actually downloads while refreshing my feeds), NNW causes a surprising amount of disruption in other downloads by other applications. It is especially frustrating when NNW starts refreshing right in the middle of a 50 MB download in Safari and causes the (non-resumable) download to time out. Given that NNW only downloads little chunks of data that usually weigh less than 100 KB each, I find that somewhat surprising.

I also remember using NNW when I was still on dial-up (not so long ago) and even on dial-up, it didn't seem to cause as much disruption in other applications.

This might have to do with the high latency of the satellite-based connection. It is almost as if, in the interval between to the first attempt to check a feed and the actual first response from the feed's server, NNW was blocking all other downloads, even though it's not actually downloading anything and just waiting for a reply from the server.

That's how it appears to me at times anyway. But if most of this stuff is controlled by Mac OS X and not by NNW, then obviously it might be a flaw in Mac OS X itself.

The one other thing that still puzzles me is why there are always TWO concurrent downloads in NNW's Activity window, even though I specified in the prefs that I only want to allow 1 download at a time.

Maybe you could clarify this for me?

RE: NNW interfering with other downloads in low-bandwidth environment

Brent Simmons — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:35:54 GMT

Pierre -- I don't know why it would impact other apps so much, except that, as you say, bandwidth is limited, and downloading feeds *does* use bandwidth. There isn't anything one can do about that fact.

The networking is done by Apple's CFHTTP networking, and I don't have control over how it uses resources. (An alternative would be to use Apple's NSURL networking, but I'd have no control there, either.)

I wish there was something I could recommend, other than launching NetNewsWire only when you want to use it, or refreshing manually only.

NNW interfering with other downloads in low-bandwidth environment

betalogue — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:25:40 GMT

My Internet connection is with a satellite provider, so it is fairly low bandwidth (theoretically 512 kbps, more like 300 kbps, and often throttled down much lower during peak hours) and suffers from significant latency. There's nothing I can do about it. (No alternatives here.)

My problem is that NNW does not play very nice with other Internet applications in this low-bandwidth, high-latency environment. I have set NNW's prefs to the minimum: "Concurrent downloads" is set to 1 (but it still lists 2 downloads at any given time in the Activity window) and I only refresh every 2 hours.

Still, whenever NNW starts refreshing, it significantly slows down all other Internet applications. Worse still, it typically causes other downloads currently in progress (in Safari or other applications) to time out due to lack of response from the server.

And web browsing can also be significantly affected, with pages taking much longer to load and sometimes not loading fully (CSS stylesheet missing, etc.).

My question is, given that I only allow one concurrent download and that typically most feeds have NOT changed from one refresh to the next and that even when they have changed, the data needed to be downloaded is only a few KB, how come NNW has such a negative impact on other Internet applications?

It seems to me that it does not need much bandwidth to refresh feeds in the background, and that it shouldn't cause other downloads to time out, even when available bandwidth is low.

I'd appreciate any advice/help on this.

Thanks in advanced.

Pierre