Auto-restart failed downloads

I want to "vote" about this. My connections is a bit iffy but it comes back automatically. I have to resume all downloads manually every time this happens.

This enhancement is critical in scenarios with bad connection reliability - like here in Luanda, Angola, where packets have to travel far and slow and all traffic is pushed through an overloaded national ISP proxy (it's actually a good representation of the street traffic here)...

The fact that it doesn't auto-retry making connections on timeout or server errors makes this (otherwise fantastic!) add-on unusable in some conditions, where it could actually play a sanity-saving part of everyday downloading. I therefor propose to raise the priority.

This is a further variation of this problem: DTA's handling of unreliable net links is rather... unreliable. Failed downloads can leave fragments of the download floating around on disk so they have to be cleaned up manually. In fact the handling of downloads as a whole is rather odd, the obvious way to do it would seem to be to pre-allocate the download space by creating a file of the required size (which eliminates problems due to running out of disk space halfway through a download, which DTA also doesn't handle very well), and then writing fragments directly to the appropriate location in the file. Once it's complete, rename the temporary file to the actual download name and you're done. Instead, DTA creates many, many small fragments for the download, which gets particularly bad if it have to restart one or more times. If you enable the disk space pre-allocate option it does create the reserved-space file, but still creates the fragments alongside it.

Could the developers perhaps comment on the reason for doing it this way? Maybe there's a technical reason for doing this, but to an outside observer it seems like simplicity made complex. How much work would it be to use the single-preallocated-file strategy? It'd help with suggesting changes if we were aware of the reasoning behind doing it the way it's currently done.

Common screen after starting several downloads. Need auto-resume feature

I love downthemall. It makes my life so much better, but if they implemented this feature it would be even better :) It doesn’t make sense that people like me who are stuck on unstable internet connections have to manually keep clicking on the resume button. Please see the attached screen shot.

I think it would be best if there was an auto-resume feature that kicked in after you get a “timeout error” or “server error”. There could be an option to set the number or retry’s and an option to set the delay before retrying. Almost all FTP programs have this feature.

*** Ticket #184 marked duplicate of this one ***

My internet provider is stopping my dial-up internet access every two hours. It's easy for me to re-establish the connection automatically, but since DownThemAll cannot continue the 'broken' downloads automatically as well, I always have to resume them manually somewhen later. Therefore an 'automatic retry' feature would be very helpful.

I feel compelled to back up previous requests to implement this feature. It would definitely help to eliminate the need for an external download manager.

It could be implemented as as retry-on-failure, with delay and number or retries settings.
Or maybe in the case of multiple downloads, if Time-Out or Server-Failure happens, the download is moved to the end of the queue.

PS: it's a shame FTP pause/resume is not implemented either

I ma using beta 1, and I concur

Replying to stackptr:

PS: it's a shame FTP pause/resume is not implemented either

CreatingPatches and #186, #259, go ahead. ;)
(If this was a trivial task it would be there already :p)

I installed the latest Beta ( 1.0 Beta 2) and I can confirm that this is still an issue with DownThemAll. I still need to manually resume my downloads.

Initial backend implementation [750].

Initial frontend implementation (preferences) [752]

Tested ok. fixed; will be available in 1.1

*** Ticket #597 marked duplicate of this one ***

Replying to MaierMan:

Tested ok. fixed; will be available in 1.1

I just downloaded your nightly build (Downloaded it 4/22/08 afternoon so you know what version. And this still fails for me without trying. I have it set to 1 minute, and then unlimited number of retries yet when the download fails it does not auto restart.

It could be some sort of special circumstance I have noticed with the failed downloads I have experienced as I have noticed as the progress bar is always red and at like 99.9% complete it when it fails. Its almost like the download just can't verify that it completed successfully so it fails the file but may have all the data or 99.9% of the data. I am not using the multi chunks feature as this download doesn't even support that or able to resume downloads which is why I was looking to take advantage of the auto restart feature. Please advise and I would be willing to help troubleshoot this if you need it but I will admit the particular server I am downloading from no matter what browser I use likes to fail at the 99.9% mark thats why I thought downthemall would help us out in getting the files.

Do not reopen old tickets please.