Re: Mozilla downloads don't use stub - a hint?

Daniel Veditz wrote:

>Rob Brandt wrote:
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>>I noticed this week when I went to the Mozilla.org home page that the download
>>links for the Windows platform were to the whole package, not the 200k (or so)
>>stub installer.
>>
>>Can anyone comment as to why this is?  Is this a hint that development/support
>>of the stub installer is history?
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>I noticed this too. Asa said it was because of the way AOL hosted
>ftp.mozilla.org on their server farm -- occassionally the rotation would
>include an ftp server that didn't actually have the Mozilla content which
>made the component download appear unreliable to many people.
>
>Hm, now that I think about it I believe the stub downloader uses a single
>connection to get all the components so I'm not sure his explaination makes
>sense, or maybe I misunderstood the problem. I'll look into it.
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well... "sorta".  There's bug in libxpnet I found in our FTP protocol 
implementation that for each file request, it will also re-request a new 
data port for the file to be sent from/to.  It does not close and open a 
new connection (this part was fixed a while back) for each file.

This might have been the cause of the problem, however, we are 
defaulting to using HTTP now.  HTTP should be downloading all files in 1 
connection without any renegotiating for ports between files (as it's a 
much simpler protocol).

We should talk to Asa to see when these problem were occurring and see 
if the installer was still using FTP as the default download protocol.

>In any case I'm not sure what the future brings. The Mozilla Organization
>will be transitioning to its own servers in the near future and they're a
>bit worried about the normal milestone bandwidth requirements. The combined
>packages will be easier to mirror which might encourage preference for that
>mechanism.
>
>The future is supposed to be independent applications like Mozilla Firebird,
>and none of those have any installer yet.
>
>-Dan Veditz
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