Five ranges "never answered" in 10 minutes, yet their chunk came back in 0.3 s on a fresh connection: the news server drops idle connections without telling, and the pool's next request on one waited for the 10-minute inactivity timeout. Now: SEED_NNTP_TIMEOUT_MS 90 s (inactivity; slow ranges keep streaming), one retry on a fresh connection, and pooled connections idle over 60 s are replaced before use. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>