Under windows this doesn’t appear to work at all – whatever value Max connections is set to, is just ignored and is always reported as “unlimited”.
Which is just as well, really. This isn’t something the user could manage competently. Still, if it’s in there it ought to work, and there’s no responsibility to keep the user from shooting himself in the foot.
i don’t really know how long it’s been there. As I indicated, I think the user has no business messing with this setting in the first place so I don’t ever touch it. This question moved me to test it. I think the setting should be removed, frankly.
Well, on my XP SP3 I’ve set network.max_connections to 3 for testing’s sake, after reading his post, and it indeed changed to [MAX: 3], so on my client I can’t reproduce the problem you report, kluelos.
I just couldn’t make it to open several connections to the server the file was hosted on, so that I can’t confirm if BC indeed disregards the set limit.
However, this whole issue is just a academical discussion, since the network.max_connections is a general option affecting both BitTorrent and HTTP/FTP an no one in his/her right mind would set this option to such low values.
Besides, for downloading’s sake, I can’t see what good does it do or how it would help to limit the number of connections to a certain HTTP server.
But, if indeed that limit in now disregarded (when set so low) then probably it should be fixed if possible.
As you said, there is no responsibility on our side to keep users from shooting themselves in the leg if they insist on doing that. B)