I wanted to do something else with my intertubes, so i clicked Pause on the galaxy client. 20 minutes later, it was still downloading away. I run a bandwidth measurement tool (netbalancer) so I can see that it never reduced the quantity it was downloading in the entire 20 minute period, and when I "unpaused", the amount downloaded magically shot up by 20 minutes worth of downloading.

Please make a pause that works. Pause immediately. Close the socket if you have to.

Sorry, I cannot make sure of that. Maybe GOG reads this and maybe they will at some point fix this but from experience I can tell you that I would not hope for a speedy fix.

Btw. the good old GOG downloader works still fine and has a working pause function (I think, I usually do not use it, although exiting it and starting it again could also count as pause).

https://www.gog.com/downloader

gog-downloader's pause was bad too, it would keep going for a while, but it wasn't this bad. The gog-downloader rate-limiter was just plain broken but it tried at least! I just rate-limited it externally.

Yeah, I use gog-downloader still sometimes, but it's kind of pathetic that galaxy has a broken pause and no resume when it's mostly a downloader. I mean limited teams and all that, but making a working resuming downloader is not *that* hard. I wrote one in python for my job recently.

Done, though I hope you won't be asking for operating system configuration dumps, logs etc. Just change the code to handle pause asynchronously.

This is a typical support response. An engineer doesn't need os dumps, logs, etc to design software where pause works right away. I've done it for sure.

I have had need to use the pause quite a bit, and while it may have been delayed a bit, it was never delayed for more than a couple of minutes (and usually even less). So the reason the engineer requires logs isn't to design a feature, but it's to see why the designed feature doesn't work as intended. It has been seen quite a few times when Galaxy was reporting "Disk Access Error", even though Galaxy's code was correct, but the AV running in the system was blocking the files. Galaxy's logs would not show any error in the code, nor would a code review shed any light, but any OS log (since it does include running processes) would help identify the specific AV as the culprit.
So yes, a good engineer will ask for logs to go with the bug report. How many logs will be asked depend on what the bug is, and if it can be reproduced or not.

Pause not working for a few minutes isn't working as intended, unless it's intended to be broken.

Dropping any kind of connection takes some time, unless you either physically disconnect the machine (though the software will still be looking for the expected data) or start dropping packets on the router (though the packets will still be moving to the router they are dropped at). My guess would be that when pressing pause Galaxy attempts to finish the currently downloading chunk(s), which depending on number of concurrent connections and line speed may take a couple of minutes, especially if misconfigured (too many connections for the line speed for example).
Still, just as you said, it shouldn't take too long, and in my experience, doesn't. So if on a certain machine the software doesn't behave as expected, additional info (the logs you say an engineer shouldn't need) may prove helpful.

As JMich pointed out, not so much to do with not working, but rather having complete packages.

And do you know how many time-out timers are there?

And time-out on time-out timers? (not yoking here)

LoL