by Quade » Sun Jul 31, 2011 10:28 pm
News servers don't give up connections easily so, if you have poor connectivity, it's easy to run out even though at the current time you have fewer connections than permitted.
Lets say you connect with 10 connections and 5 drop out. Newsbin will pause a little then re-establish the 5 connections that dropped. At that point in time, the server thinks you have 15 connections. If this continues, even though you may never have more then 10 real connections, the connection timeout delays at the server end can eventually make the server think you've run out. That's what seems to be happening here.
The core problems is your connections are dropping out. If you're using wireless, you should probably use a cable instead. You should probably make your virus scanner or firewall ignore usenet traffic and/or use alternate ports or SSL to hide the fact you're using usenet from your firewall. If you're not using Astra or Giga, you might try disabling "X-Features" in the server options. You can also work around this be leaving a large buffer of unused connections so, as connections die, there's time for the server to clean out the dead connections before you hit the limit. Giganews lets me use 50 connections. I think I use 10 right now. It gets me full speed and leaves me a 40 connection buffer (not that I need it). I don't have any problems with connections dropping out here.