Am I maxing my system limits?

[0kavango]

Hi,

I've been using sabnzb for a long time, but recently got FTTP installed at home with a 1Gb connection. Speedtest is happily reporting around 900+mbps down so I assume I should be able to reach speeds of 100MB+ in theory.

However, some things don't seem right...Firstly the wrench tool never reports my bandwidth being anywhere near 100MB, it can be anywhere between 20-60MB and is different each time I refresh it. This doesn't seem to make too much sense as I can easily achieve a steady 70MB on most downloads.

This leads me on to my main question of why I can't seem to get a download speed of closer to 90-100MB? The speeds seem to climb to around 80MB and then quickly drop back to 60-65 and then climb again, It's very erratic. Reading around the forums I think my PC should be ok to handle these speeds, the details from the wrench are:

Used cache 0 B (0 articles)
System performance (Pystone) 140841 Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570…
Download folder speed 357.2 MB/s (C:\Users\Chris Burwell\D…)
Complete folder speed 361.1 MB/s (C:\New Downloads to Sort)
Internet Bandwidth 12 MB/s (96 Mbps) - Definitely odd as it downloads much quicker than this with the test file (75MB with the 10Gb file)

It's an older i5 machine with 16Gb RAM and a brand new Samsumg EVO 970 SSD.

I have already figured AVAST shields drop the speeds even lower when downloading, but the above problems are with that disabled (and Windows defender is also off).

I'm running two servers at priority 0 with up to 50 connections (both currently set at 8, but doesn't make too much difference if I use more, I've tried various combinations right up to 50 on each server).

If the machine can't handle it, then I'll stop looking for answers and settle with 70MB-80MB speed, but everywhere I look seems to tell me I should be able to achieve more from my new fibre line...

Thanks to anyone that can shed some light on this

[sander]

So what is the mean speed you get on the 10GB reference download (wrench -> test download -> 10GB)? You can see it aferwards in History, in the dropdown on the right. For example "DownloadDownloaded in 1 min 3 seconds at an average of 41.6 MB/s"

[0kavango]

Hi sander, thanks for replying.

I currently have the two servers set to 8 connections each and no download limit and the result from the 10Gb down is as follows:

DownloadDownloaded in 2 mins 32 seconds at an average of 68.4 MB/s

Thanks.

[sander]

Did you read https://sabnzbd.org/wiki/advanced/highspeed-downloading
Plus: disable SSL (so no NTTPS) to see if that gives you more speed.

FWIW: Your hardware is OK, but not too impressive. And less than what I would expect based on your hardware description (i5 and EVO).
As comparison, here are the results of my not-too-special laptop:

System performance (Pystone) 225251 Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8265…
Download folder speed 623 MB/s (C:\Users\S\…)
Complete folder speed 645.8 MB/s (C:\Users\S\…)
Internet Bandwidth 77.3 MB/s (618.4 Mbps)

All my numbers are much better than your score (And I'm only on a 400/400 Mbps Fiber). So that might impact your download speed.


BTW you i5-3570 was released in 2012. That's indeed older. Let's see if the mentioned settings change it.

[0kavango]

Hi Sander

I did read the link you provided - thanks. I hadn't tried disabling SSL but something really strange has now happened...

I disabled my second server and just ran the one with about 15 connections and SSL disabled - nice and smooth download at around 90MB and a nice straight line on the graph. I then turned SSL back on and the same result. This lead to me to believe it must be an issue with the second server (they're both using different types of SSL) as the graph was very erratic before. However, I re-enabled the second server with SSL and 5 connections and it's exactly the same - a steady 90MB speed and smooth line on the graph.

I think 90MB is still a little under what a 1Gb connection can provide, but I can cope with it - maybe when I do upgrade the PC it will deliver more...

So, I have no idea what's changed and I had tried several reboots and various other things to get a smooth download, but in the end disabling and re-enabling SSL seems to be all that it has taken to fix it!

Thanks.