Proposal: stop holding composes for preupgrade bugs at Alpha and Beta phases

[John Reiser]

On 04/10/2012 07:03 AM, Horst H. von Brand wrote:
> John Reiser <jreiser at bitwagon.com> wrote:

>>      A close-to-optimal strategy for typical cable modem ISP is:
>>           1. Sort the download list by size of file to be downloaded.
>>           2. Run two parallel threads.  The first thread downloads
>>              from large to small, the second from small to large.
>>              Stop when the threads meet somewhere in the "middle".

> I don't understand why this should be better than each thread just getting
> the next available one.

The advantage is a greater tendency to maintain high total data throughput during
periods when setup/teardown on the short-file thread encounters protocol latency
(and thus zero data throughput on that thread.)  The thread for longer files
is more likely to be in the middle of a transfer, and thus capable of boosting
its throughput, while the other thread suffers low throughput due to starting
or stopping the transfer of an individual file.  If both threads choose randomly,
then it is likely that there are more periods when they both suffer low throughput.

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