Server Priorities

The usage of server priorities is very important to those with multiple servers. Many people have access to an ISP newsserver and wish to supplement that with an account at a premium provider. For heavy downloaders it is often desirable to first use your ISP server for as much as you can get - they often have no limits - and only for the missing pieces use the premium provider - which you pay for. Here I'll explain how to make use of NewsPro's advanced priority abilities.

 
Defining priorities isn't complicated, yet it's very powerful. The first thing to note is what order the priority number goes: 1 is the lowest while 128 is the highest.
 
The idea behind prioritizing is that you want the highest numbered servers to be used first and the least numbered to be used last.
 
In my example to the left you can see I have various priorities defined. Note that my ISP server, news.qwest.net, has the highest priority of 6, as does the free text server news.freenet.de. The Newsfeeds servers each have a priority of 4, less than my ISP, because I pay for this service. Easynews has the lowest priority of any because, like with Newsfeeds, I pay for the service. I define it lower than Newsfeeds, however, because I have a much lower download limit at Easynews and therefore wish to conserve bandwidth if possible.
 
The 'S' next to some servers means 'Strict'. There is a checkbox next to the priority setting for this option. With this option checked for a server, no lower priority servers will ever be used if articles queued up are available on this higher priority server. For example with my Qwest server set as strict, no articles available there would ever be obtained from news2.newsfeeds.com if they were already available on Qwest's server. You might ask, "Why is there a strict option? Aren't priorities supposed to ensure this already?" Well, yes and no. If I were to define in my task properties a max article task count of 10, while I defined for news.qwest.net just three (3) maximum tasks, there would be seven (7) available tasks for getting articles. If an article were available on news.qwest.net as well as news2.newsfeeds.com and 'Strict' was not enabled for news.qwest.net, then NewsPro would try to use as many available article tasks as possible, even if it meant using a lower priority server. This is helpful for those who would prefer to use a higher priority server but to maximize bandwidth it is okay to use lower priorities if necessary. Take this same example but add 'Strict' to news.qwest.net. Now even though only three tasks are being used by Qwest and the article is available on the lower priority news2.newsfeeds.com, it will not be retrieved until it can do so first from Qwest. 'Strict' basically tells NewsPro "never use any servers with a lower priority than this unless there is no way to get the article from here." Notice how I have all of my Newsfeeds servers as strict also. I want to ensure Easynews isn't used unless entirely necessary, in this case the article would have to be unavailable first on news.qwest.net and also unavailable on each Newsfeeds server. Only then would it use news.easynews.com.
 
Now for an explanation of subsets. The 'Exclusion Subset' box allows you to define groups of servers that will only be used one at a time. This was initially introduced to help with Newsfeeds policies as they imposed a 'one server at a time' restriction. Each user could use their three (3) allowed tasks per server, but only one server could be connected to at a time. By putting multiple servers in a single subset NewsPro knows to use only one of the servers within that subset at a time. Also the program ensures that it properly closes all lingering connections before trying to connect to another server in order to avoid any errors. Priorities within subsets work just as usual - any servers within the subset with a higher priority will be used before others. For many users this option is not necessary, but still it is helpful to have available.
                                       
 
A setting in the General Properties menu has an effect on priorities as well. The option 'Ignore Priorities For Maxed Servers' comes in to play when a particular server reaches its download limit (as determined by an error returned by the server and matching what is defined in General Properties, 'Exceeding Download Limit'). With this option checked priorities will be ignored if a server reaches its limit and the article needed from it are available elsewhere. For example if Qwest were to impose a download limit and I reached that, NewsPro would suspend that server and continue grabbing articles from elsewhere according to defined priorities. If I uncheck this box NewsPro will wait until the server again becomes available to retrieve the articles.