The external http resource server function within MTA hasn't worked for me in the past.. every time I turn it on, people would complain of timeouts, often I would experience them myself.
Now in 1.0.4, it seems a lot of work has been done to allow external web servers to host resources for the server, thereby taking some of the load off, allowing the server to focus on synching players.
DRuG and AGS servers now receive their resources from the
www.aussiegameserver.com apache web server. I have reduced the packet size for the transfers from 64 down to 8, as documented in the new 1.0.4 mtaserver.conf for use with Apache.
The result has been we now have an MTA server with 10 people in it, and it's been getting over 15.. all in the hour since setting up an external web server with a folder hosting the resources, then configuring the MTA server accordingly. The resources absolutely fly in, as apposed to when they were served directly from mta - they used to crawl.
An added bonus is that my home line is now using around 100k/sec upload instead of 800k/sec.. a big difference should be seen in my cap.. the bulk of the data now comes out of the ags web server.
Enjoy!