Shareaza

I have two large files I've been downloading for over a week via ed2k. Both have lots of sources (one has nearly 50, both over 15). Until a few days ago, they were downloading intermittently and not very fast, but both of them were remotely queued on one or more sources nearly all of the time when not outright downloading.

Then, sometime around Tuesday it's like a switch was thrown somewhere. Neither of them will queue with any of their sources. I've been making occasional smaller downloads, some ed2k and some G2, in the meantime without noticing anything unusual; it's just these two big files that are acting like every single one of their sources dropped dead simultaneously a few days ago.

So, I don't think this can be a network issue. It's somehow specific to either these particular files, or to larger files in general. The smaller is 700MB and the larger nearly 3GB, while the largest size of any file I've had download progress on in the last few days has been under 5MB, so the threshold may lie somewhere between 5 and 700MB.

Strangely enough, one of them got enqueued again within a couple of hours of my making that post. The other one got enqueued again sometime in the last hour.

I'd suspect that my post prompted someone to flip that switch back the other way, except that ed2k isn't supposed to work like that -- there shouldn't be any global switch someone can flip that stops all enqueueing for large files. If there is, sooner or later the MPAA will use legal muscle to force it to be permanently switched off again, since doing so will end ed2k's usefulness specifically for sharing pirated movies and the **AA organizations have a demonstrated lack of concern for collateral damage from their antipiracy efforts.

ED2K does work like that IF (and only if) most of the available sources are partial. Shareaza dequeues them after it has downloaded all the chunks the sources have, then after a while a complete source shows up (flicks a switch...) and everybody gets new chunks to share and everything is well once again. This is obviously pretty rare on files with significant source numbers, but it does happen. I think the way Shareaza handles sources without new chunks was changed recently because I do not remember having seen this in earlier versions but now it is relatively common. Could be linked to a drop in the quality of the ED2K network or at least the part visible to Shareaza making complete sources less common, but that is hard to tell. I'd have to try using eMule to compare and I already tried that twice and finding more sources just is not worth the suffering for me.

They've both got lots of complete sources. They've been connecting again recently, but only getting new chunks quite infrequently. One problem seems to be an incompatibility with the LPhant client: when Shareaza enqueues with an LPhant client it gets dropped instead of receiving a chunk when it gets to the head of the line. Other emule clients seem to work fine though -- but for one of the downloads the most readily accessible complete source is an LPhant client.

P.S. Why do my threads keep disappearing from Bugs and appearing in Help and Support? That causes me to not notice new posts to them until I eventually think to check here and see if this has happened again.

I think you nailed it with the "readily accessible." ED2K has long queues especially for people who download more than upload (say, because the source already has a complete copy of the file and wants nothing from you) so getting anything from a source with accessibility problems can take a while. Especially if there are enough incomplete sources that Shareaza (and other clients) do not search for new sources and may not notice the original source coming back online for quite some time. In Shareaza you can prevent this from happening to your files by creating a separate queue with its own bandwidth quota for the new/priority/release files, but it requires some work from the user and most ED2K clients do not have Shareaza's level of upload queue control anyway.

The reason threads change forums is because a mod thought they better fit another forum. "Bugs" is really for when you have a pretty clear idea of what Shareaza might be doing wrong that a dev can check from the code if he has time, but are not certain enough to make a bug tracker entry without asking for more comments. For example, I made few posts when I recently had issues with BT where I was pretty sure what was happening and what was wrong, but wasn't sure because I just don't use BT that much and could have missed something. Just seeing odd behaviour without clear cause in Shareaza is probably bit too vague. (Just guessing, only the person who moved the threads would know.)

Well then how the hell am I supposed to know where it's gone when one disappears, even assuming I notice that one HAS disappeared?

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