[Pythonmac-SIG] BitTorrent on Mac OS 9: redux

[Bob Ippolito]

On Jun 24, 2005, at 9:53 PM, Phil wrote:

> Some folks on the list may remember a thread, from a little more  
> than a
> year ago
> (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pythonmac-sig/2004-April.txt.gz),  
> where I
> asked the following question:
>
> "I'm trying to track down a bug that shows up when I run
> BitTorrent for Mac OS 9, and I'm not sure whether it's a problem with
> BitTorrent, MacPython, or some combination of both...in BitTorrent,  
> when
> you resume downloading after having stopped (say, to restart your
> computer), the
> client checks the portion of the file you've already downloaded.   
> (I assume
> it does this to test for corruption and so forth.)  Normally, under  
> Windows
> or OS X, this takes just a few minutes.
...
> While btdownloadheadless.py is "checking existing file", the MacPython
> window normally updates every eight seconds or so, changing the  
> "percent
> done" to reflects how much is left to check.  On a file of, say,  
> 250MB,
> that "percent done" changes by an average of 0.1% every update --  
> which
> means that checking the whole file takes about 8000 seconds, or 2+  
> hours.
>
> However, if you resize the MacPython window by clicking the lower- 
> right
> hand corner, it updates *immediately*.  And if you resize the window
> constantly, clicking on the lower-right corner over and over again, it
> updates nearly as fast as you click it [1] -- at the minimum, you  
> can get
> it to update once per second, which means that it's checking the  
> file about
> eight times as fast as it would otherwise be (at the expense of  
> your having
> to sit there, clicking hundreds of times!).  It's still not as fast  
> as on
> Windows, where it takes mere seconds -- but cutting the amount of  
> time it
> takes from 150 minutes, to 20 or fewer, would still be huge.

Sounds like it's probably a bug in MacPython or GUSI maybe.. but  
unfortunately I don't think anyone is ever going to bother to fix it,  
since OS9 is not currently a supported platform for Python.

-bob