"Tony Godshall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> > available bandwidth and adjusts to that. The usefullness is in >> > trying to be unobtrusive to other users. >> >> The problem is that Wget simply doesn't have enough information to be >> unobtrusive. Currently available bandwidth can and does change as new >> downloads are initiated and old ones are turned off. Measuring >> initial bandwidth is simply insufficient to decide what bandwidth is >> really appropriate for Wget; only the user can know that, and that's >> what --limit-rate does. > > My patch (and the doc change in my patch) don't claim to be totally > unobtrusive [...] Obviously people who the level of unobtrusiveness > you define shouldn't be using it.
It was never my intention to define a particular level of unobtrusiveness; the concept of being unobtrusive to other users was brought up by Jim and I was responding to that. My point remains that the maximum initial rate (however you define "initial" in a protocol as unreliable as TCP/IP) can and will be wrong in a large number of cases, especially on shared connections. Not only is it impossible to be "totally unobtrusive", but any *automated* attempts at being nice to other users are doomed to failure, either by taking too much (if the download starts when you're alone) or too little (if the download starts with shared connection).
