henry (08/25/82)
When talking to a site which is heavily loaded and which has a lot of traffic waiting for you, uucico times out fairly easily. This is particularly true if the site you are talking to does not have the bug fixes I sent out some time ago for the imbecilic code in V7 anlwrk.c. (The V7 anlwrk.c scans the entire directory even if it filled up its work list early in the scan, and has some other time-wasting botches. Some later uucp's have some of the problems fixed, but perhaps not all.) Uucico's tolerance for sluggish neighbors can be greatly increased by changing PKTIME in pk1.c from its distributed value (10) to something more reasonable. We have been running for some time with a PKTIME of 30 and have just increased it to 60 -- recent decvax outages have caused a pileup of utzoo-bound traffic there, and decvax's uucp doesn't seem to cope with it well. There are several other constants elsewhere -- timeout counts and so forth -- that look like plausible candidates for increases, but some earlier experiments with that were total failures. PKTIME is the thing to bump. To give proper credit, it was watmath!dmmartindale who first tried increasing PKTIME; I got the idea from him.