Feature req: save status of in-progress searches

[Lanigiro]

Feature request: Save status of in-progress searches, and auto-resume where left off after any interruptions. The saving should be done at the same times that the searches.dat file is updated on disk, which is fairly frequent. If Shareaza crashes after one such save and before the next, and is restarted, it should (after reconnecting to the relevant networks) continue searching with the state of the search identical to what it was at the moment of that last save before the crash. For example if a search had reached about 3.5 million leaves and 35,000 hubs and had, in all likelihood, roughly 1 million more leaves and 10,000 more hubs to go, then it should continue after the interruption to find those remaining leaves and hubs, and then halt, exactly as if nothing had happened.

Rationale: Shareaza is quite unstable still, prone to unrecoverable hangs, and external problems (e.g. Windows crashes) can also interrupt it. This was less of an issue in the days when it completed a full search of the G2 network in about 4 hours.

These days, a full search of the G2 network takes roughly 60 hours, 15 times(!) as long as it did back then. I'm not entirely sure why, since I doubt the G2 network has grown by that large a factor in the past few years. But the fact remains that if you search for rare-ish files (so it doesn't rack up 200 hits before exhausting the network) it used to take about 4 hours to halt having found everything (if anything) that was there to be found, and now it takes about 60 hours.

And right now, as near as I can figure if Shareaza crashes at the 50 hour mark you have to start over from scratch. Certainly the search, if resumed with the "search" and then "no, don't clear previous results" choices, takes 60 more hours rather than 10 more hours to halt. And presumably if the rare file you were looking for is out there, but in the last sixth of the places it would search, you will now have to wait an average of another 55 hours, instead of just another 5 hours, before it pops into the result list.

Therefore, if searching is going to take this kind of time to scour the network thoroughly for a rare file, then it should resumably save its progress so that this is not lost if there is a crash. Especially if the developers aren't going to do anything to make Shareaza more stable.

[brov]

Really? 60 hours to search entire G2? From where you got that number? In fact, it takes less than 2 minutes... Maybe you're searching for some rare files that are unavailable during your search... G2 is dynamic, every second someone connects, someone else disconnects...