My apologies, I don’t know much about network communication other than simply being connected to the Internet. For example, I don’t know what “being behind a proxy” means.
I have apps where at start up they use a HTTPSocket and do a version comparison and see if there’s a new version up - standard stuff. I also do some phoning home. AFAIK this causes no performance problem for my users.
I had a person, though, tell me the program took a long time to start up. He actually said:
[quote]A couple of days ago I sent you some screen shots of [appname] guzzling CPU time and seeming to be hung. This occurs at startup when behind a proxy. If I turn off the networking, it starts just fine. Is there some Internet check that occurs (if a network interface is up) that may have been the source of the problem?
[/quote]
Can anyone explain this to me and is there anything I can do to address the issue? The HTTPSocket is really easy to use and it’s been very successful for me. But what about this guys issue?
Proxies are sometimes used by corporations to control incoming and outgoing network traffic. It allows them to cache data and even redirect traffic if necessary. very often, if a user is behind a proxy, they do not have direct access to the internet.
To handle this, you can set the HTTPProxyAddress and HTTPProxyPort properties and implement the HTTPProxyAuthentication event.
If you’re running on a Mac, and you want to be able to test this, check out the Proxy app. We now use this internally for testing the proxy settings in the IDE and Feedback.
So a probable implementation is that if a person knows they are behind a proxy, they would check a box saying “Use Proxy” and they would fill out textfields for the Proxy Address and Proxy Port, similar to what Firefox itself does (see below)?
BTW, why does my Firefox settings - which I’ve never touched - say I’m using a proxy? If I’m not behind a proxy, why wouldn’t this say No Proxy? I’m just a lone user behind a router. What makes me (and most of my users) different than this corporate user, doesn’t this say we are all behind proxies?
Our sockets don’t automatically handle proxies, so you’ll still need to do this yourself.
Having that set in Firefox, doesn’t do anything for you if your system properties have no proxies set.
OK, makes sense, I get it now. The user solved his own problem by switching off his networking and that seems to be the overarching solution. Thanks Greg!