Downloading objects fails after a few downloads - Solved

[AlanUS]

Hello,

Following a crash of my home PC, I had to reinstall Anyrail on a freshly installed Win7 PC.

Downloading the User Objects takes forever! It stops after a few objects download, varying from 0 to 20 or so objects. I acknowledge the error message and then press again the download new items buttons and it restarts where it stops. I don't despair getting the whole library after 200 tries, but it is quite boring.

This didn't happen with the previous installation of AnyRail, where the whole library was downloaded in one pass.

Can it be a server being too busy?

[David]

Normally it should proceed quite quickly. No, the server is not too busy.
What is the error message you get?

David.

[santerdam]

Did you check your virus-scanner ? Sometimes those scanners can't work with a high download-rate of relative small files. Have a look at the settings for accepted file-extensions.

Sander

[AlanUS]

What is the error message you get?

Actually no error message. Just an empty box with an OK, and then dowload stops.
I was able to speed up the process by reinstalling an older version of the database that was installed on another computer, so it only downloaded new items.

[AlanUS]

Did you check your virus-scanner ? Sometimes those scanners can't work with a high download-rate of relative small files. Have a look at the settings for accepted file-extensions.

The file extension for AnyRail libraries is obviously not known by default by my virus-scanner. However I've noticed in the parameters that there is a timeout for scanning files, so you may be perflectly right with your comment.
I'll need to make some tries.

[Jeff]

I'm quite sure that your scanner has a way to register exceptions by file type, so that should be your first line of attack. Since the .any files are basically data, once the file is confirmed as that type, you're safe to ignore it.

[AlanUS]

I'm quite sure that your scanner has a way to register exceptions by file type.

Yes it has. But before I do that, I'll try to change the timeout ... just to figure out if it is the origin of the problem.

[santerdam]

.... Since the .any files are basically data ....

Don't worry about .ANY files at this moment. Your question is related to downloading User Objects. They have extensions .UDO and .SUDO

Sander

[Jeff]

My comment remains relevant. Any file used by AR in data storage is so far from anything that could be dangerous if set to 'ignore' by a virus scanner that it doesn't register on threat radar.

[AlanUS]

I think that the virus-scanner timer limit was the real problem. I disabled this parameter, deleted all objects' files and restarted a fresh download. The downloading of the whole user objects' library (1075 objects as of today, 60+ MB) was performed in one pass.
Thanks to all for the tips.

[JoshS]

I am brand new to AnyRail and experienced this exact same issue this week.  Windows XP, SOLID STATE HARD DRIVE (!), Core i5 760 Quad core CPU @ 4.0GHz, 4GB RAM. 

It was heinously slow and basically froze up the UI of the AnyRail app for the entire 15-30 minutes it took to download all 1,056 objects.

This is definitely a programming glitch.  It is very inefficient for the software to be making 1,056 individual HTTP transactions to the website to download the database one by one. Please consider offering a ZIP file that the software downloads in 1 shot, and then it can do the updates after that? 

There is definitely some kind of nasty thread blocking going on, or a slow webserver on the otherside, or something.  I'm a master power user and used to develop a little software myself, and I feel utterly confident the issue lies within AnyRail. 

I also do not run a realtime virus scanner so that cannot be the issue here.  Even if I had, with an SSD the disk access should still be blistering fast.

[santerdam]

JoshS,

Are you sure it is "definitely a programming glitch" ? Many, many users could download all object very fast without any problem. I am not convinced the issue is caused by Anyrail - we don't see many reports on this forum, the problem of AlanUS was caused by the virusscanner.

Sander

[David]

I'm currently taking a closer look and there are two causes for slow downloading:
1. The http keep-alive flag is not set. Fixing this reduces the download time by about 20%.
2. The local download window is updated for each downloaded item. Of course it's highly dependent on the user's computer how much time this takes. To improve performance, I'll change this to update only every 25 items.

With the two updates described above, I reduced the download time for all items in our test environment from 183 seconds to 54 seconds.
I'm on a 100Mb glass fiber line, about 100 kilometers away from the servers in Amsterdam.

David.

[AlanUS]

the problem of AlanUS was caused by the virusscanner.

True for what seemed to be the cause of the problem (failure to download). However, even after I fixed the Virus Scanner issue, downloading all of the 1000+ objects was very long ...