Feedback: blocking of tabs navigation when downloading files

DEVONagent Feedback
1

Dear devs,

I have been using DevonAgent to quickly acquire data, to enter into Devonthink.
I might not use DevonAgent in the most efficient way, but at least it is in a simple enough way to understand for me :slight_smile:.

My usage scenario was:
I would like to download all the PDFs in a web-published repository of paper (papers of students). Links to these paper were distributed over 20 linked HTML pages.

My ideal way of work would have been:

  1. Open page 1 in DevonAgent
  2. Use the ‘magic hat’ and select all linked PDFs for download
  3. go to next page, and repeat from step 2 until last page is reached
  4. Wait for all the requested PDFs to download to complete.

My experienced usage was:

  1. Open page 1 in DevonAgent
  2. Use the ‘magic hat’ and select all linked PDFs for download
  3. Wait for all the requested PDFs to download of a single page to complete. (as tab navigation was blocked by the requested downloads)
  4. go to next page, and repeat from step 2 until last page is reached

I could not identify a quick way to prioritise navigation in the tabs over downloading files.

with regards,
Sander

2

Actually downloading shouldn’t have (almost) no impact on the responsiveness of the user interface. Are you able to reproduce this? What’s the URL of the webpages?

3

A small clarification: with ‘blocking’ I meant only that the page was not loading further. (I do not mean that the UI becomes non-responsive)

A few more tests:

In the office I could not reproduce the issue, however at home I could.
(I would assume the main factor would be the less available bandwidth at home ± 15Mbps)

A second test with a (new) random site with PDFs, showed that DevonAgent is not blocking tabs by default indeed.

However, the site for which I was using it, still shows this behaviour, when DevonAgent was busy downloading PDFs from the same site.

  1. The tab-browsing did not show ‘blocking’ behaviour If DevonAgents download queue was still busy with downloading PDFs from other sites (hence only blocking when PDFs were downloaded from the site itself.

I can share the url of the site by private message (if this feature can be enabled for my profile).

with regards,
Sander

4

Downloads and webpages don’t block each other. But maybe the server limits the amount of concurrent connections. How many downloads did you add to the queue?

5

The issue has been resolved. I was not able to consistently reproduce it.
The nr. of concurrent connections seems to be the most likely explanation.

I was downloading BSc theses from a repository as reference material. A single page contained approx. 10 links to PDFs, and in total I needed to visit ± 37 pages (thus approx. 370 PDFs of theses to be downloaded).

The issue has been resolved for me. Thank you for your feedback!