[ms4w-users] Problem w/ download site

[Daniel Morissette]

Jeff McKenna wrote:
> Thanks for letting us know, it's fixed for now.  Apparently this is 
> caused by people using download accelerators which causes too many 
> parallel downloads crashing the server, and we have noticed this 
> happening more frequently recently.
> 

Actually the server is not exactly crashing (it would take more than 
that to take Apache down)... the download accelerators when they are 
misconfigured will use all available connections, making the site appear 
as if it's down, but in reality it's just that all available connections 
are in use. I have pumped up the number of allowed concurrent 
connections, hopefully that will help.

Note that in addition to locking out legitimate users, download 
accelerators tend to waste bandwidth big time, without any real benefit 
for the actual user of the download accelerator... so I would discourage 
the use of download accelerators by anyone who cares about the efficient 
use of internet resources and the long term availability of free 
services such as maptools.org.

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/