Re: [Pan-users] Feature request: additional download option

[Jim Reiss]

> I like this idea, and could have used it myself a number of times.  However, 
> perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought that unless you deleted the current batch 
> of overviews, once it hit the ones already downloaded, it stopped, or at 
> least skipped over the ones already d/led. such that if you had started to 
> d/l 50K, and had aborted after 20K (@ the 30K mark), then set it to d/l from 
> 70K, it would d/l 70K-50K, and 30K-0, skipping the overview sequence numbers 
> it already had.
It looked to me like it always downloads the entire set of headers
again.  This sort of skipping you describe (in reverse) would be great for
the "all headers" option...on one of the free news services I maxed out a 50
megabyte daily download limit on one group because it kept on timing out
on all headers before it finished getting the headers...started from
scratch every time and eventually exceeded quota.

> Perhaps far more helpful, however, would be what I think I've seen referred
> to as the X-over function.  (I may have the name of the function wrong, but 
> there is such a function as described here, correctly named here or not.)  
> This, as I understand it, allows server side searching of overviews to 
> retrieve specifically the ones requested.
<snip>
> The bad think about this is that because it DOES require server-side
> searching and therefore CPU and memory resources, many news providers
> turn this feature off, or limit it
<snip>
That would certainly be a downside, and it seems like having the client
do the work is preferable, even if it's less powerful and requires more
effort on the user's part.  Server overloading seems common enough as it
is.