The coordinator (38) and the prober (8) had a fixed split; with history paused the coordinator's stood idle while the prober's were its limit. nntp_shares: each process syncs every 15 s (priority, minimum, what it could use, what it has open) and gets what it may open: minimums first, then by priority what each wants, growing only into connections the others closed or gave up. The pool's size and the prober's lanes follow the grant; the coordinator doubles its want while work waits for a connection, else asks for its peak in use and a margin; the prober wants its maximum unless the queue is dry. Claims scale with the lanes. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>