Forums Feature Suggestions Connection strategy

Can mIRC switch to a "most successful" or "most stable" rather than "last used" strategy on connecting to networks. At present, mIRC tries each server in a cycle, regardless of whether some are consistently more successful or stable than others.

Under a "most successful/most stable" strategy, mIRC would remember the last 50 or so servers used to connect to each network over the last <n> days (and possibly the time taken to connect), and therefore know which servers were most successful in each group, which disconnected most readily, and prioritize the most successful and stable when it "tries next server in group".

This would also solve the problem where a stable server fails and instead of trying another server that's proven quite stable recently, mIRC goes off trying all the less stable servers in cyclical order. That's time consuming when some networks can have 20-30 servers.

It would also address where some servers are less stable or "dump" connections more than others.


I'm sure this would be pretty simple and greatly improve connection success. The change to a "most stable" strategy rather than "next server in group" strategy would be transparent to users, and the other (advanced) options would be: to tune the stability criteria (last <n> connections over last <n> days).

If votes count, then this has mine.

yeah nice idea

If you use a stable server quite often and it fails one time arent all the others you used already classed as unstable ? because the stable one that fails has had more uptime then the others ?

This is quite confusing you expect it to reconnect to the last used. A decent network has a hubserver to take care of this so i suggest always connect to the hubserver and let that decide which connection is right for you.

You can't assume all people use "decent networks" where there is a hub server. You can't assume that hub servers are stable and reliable. Anyone who hangs round for a while on popular networks notices people who have trouble connecting via hubs or via certain servers.

A server is not up 100%, that's the redundancy built into IRC. Every network has good and bad patches. So a decent size network has some servers which (for you) are more reliable, and others which (for you) are less. If your preferred server goes down, what you want mIRC to do is switch to the one thats next most reliable (for you). Not just to say "well, his #1 server has failed so lets try any others at all, in whatever alphabetic order happens to be". Because those others will include some which are almost as good, and some which are definitely not.

If you happen to be on a network with a reliable capable hub server, then yes, you can let it do the work. But in that case you don't need the "try next in group" option anyway. For you it's pointless. So this is a request for the many people who do need mIRC to auto-try other servers, that it is more thoughtful how it chooses which to try, rather than just cycles mindlessly in whatever alphabetic order happens to be.

looks like someone listened to this one