DA and slow network connections

DEVONagent Feedback
1

In my case, DEVONAgent can through out some suprising results from time to time. Most perplexing is when I feed it a simple query and it comes back with no results whereas the same search string in google returns page after page.

Just recently I figured out what was happening. I often time am connected on a rather slow VPN network. When that connection is particularly slow, DA’s log shows ‘no match’ for every entry. Not cool. Two thoughts for improvement come to mind:
a) The entry should say ‘timed out’
b) The time out value should be a preference setting.

2

Just curious but how slow is that network? One workaround might be to reduce the number of concurrent connections (see Preferencs > Search).

3

It is slow. Sorry don’t have numbers for you here.

I will see how limiting number of connections works. I do think DA should have a more proper message in the log file. “no match” is misleading.

4

Usually DEVONagent should log HTTP error codes or status messages in case of a failure. “No match” means that there was either really no match as DEVONagent Pro downloads & matches each page on its own, depending on the preferences. Or the network returned incomplete data but no error code.

5

I hope you can appreciate that making the distinction between a true “no match” and “error” of some kind makes a difference to me as a user. I would like to see that improved in some future version.

6

Which search string and which search set/plugin did you use? Would be useful to ensure that it’s not a different issue.

7

It is really a slow network issue because: a) I use many different search strings for a wide variety of topics all are slow and b) when I am in a location where I can choose between the VPN connection (== slow network) and straight connection (== fast), the same queries all of a sudden show lots of results.

I know now not to run DA while on our VPN connection but I don’t always have that luxury. Secondly, not all our corporate locations have a normal (non VPN) fast network and so DA returns “no match” for all searches.

It really “feels” as if DA “times out” but reports this as “no match”.

8

That’s a little bit strange. As long as a network connection returns the right error code, DEVONagent should actually log “Timeout” (and does over here). Do browsers, e.g. Safari, report a timeout while using the VPN connection?

9

I can get a timeout from the safari in many cases but not all.

10

You can reduce the number of network connections and still maintain a reasonable amount of production by running two or more DA searches in parallel.
I’ve found that on my particular machine - OS - network I can run three searches in parallel per user without too much risk.
The risk is that if one search crashes for one user, they all crash.
So if you need more sessions in parallel, use more OS X users. Downside: each user is a separate license.