Download threads randomly freeze

PorcPuff · Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 3:53 am Post subject: Download threads randomly freeze

I've been seeing this a little more often recently. After a while, at random, some download threads will simply hang. The status bar of those download threads will freeze at any point and even if you halt all connections, they remain in the connections window, still.

Other threads continue to work around them quite happily, but the only way I've found to bring them back to life is to restart NMPro, then use the "Retry selected Jobs" button on the articles that hung. They then download without any issues and all is fine.

Any thoughts on why this might be? Sometimes there is a "Connection failure: Socket Error # 11004" in the logs around that time, but more often than not, there are no errors reported at all and NMPro seems perfectly happy!

administrator · Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 1:31 pm Post subject:

You must be using SSL?

Regards

PorcPuff · Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 1:34 pm Post subject:

Yep, I'm using SSL.

administrator · Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 1:47 pm Post subject:

That's one of the downsides to using SSL. The SSL DLL doesn't always notify NMP when a connection times out, so NMP just keeps waiting. Unfortunately, I've not found any way to abort the connection because of the way that the connection stack interacts with the SSL DLL. Even killing the thread doesn't work.

Normally, NMP manages all conections internally, but when using SSL it passes control to the DLL.

Regards

BZB · Expert Joined: 26 Apr 2005 Posts: 1387

PorcPuff · Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 5:33 pm Post subject:

Not sure - the SSL dlls with NMPro don't have a version in the details, so maybe the man himself will be able to tell what ships in the normal installation package?

It's not a major problem, otherwise I'd consider stopping using SSL in NMPro and instead use the SSL built in to the Giganews accelerator. I just prefer to keep the SSL in the application itself.

administrator · Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 6:34 pm Post subject:

The ones packaged most recently with NMP are dated 11/7/2009 and are listed as OpenSSL v0.9.8l in the documentation. These are the last that were backported to Indy 9, which is what NMP uses. There are newer ones for Indy 10 that may work.

Regards

BZB · Expert Joined: 26 Apr 2005 Posts: 1387

I've recently used 1.0.0a/b/c/d, and apart from a spurious error every session on the first connect, it seems to work. I've used both the Fulgan and the Shining Light builds, and they both seem to be fine under Windows 64 (though I'm using the 32bit libraries).

There were quite a few bug and security fixes, and I did notice significant speed-ups once all connections are streaming when I moved from the Indy 9 compatible builds to the newer libraries.