Insane spikes on WHS

[bagstone]

Hi all!

Simple problem - no solution as of now. Insane spikes regarding my download speed. Guess a picture says it all:

It's ok for the first few 100M, then it drops to zero and just from time to time downloads some articles.

Here's the requested specs and some more information you might ask for anyways:

Version: 0.6.5
OS: WHS (v1)
Install-type: Windows Installer
Skin (if applicable): Plush
Firewall Software: None except Windows Firewall
Are you using IPV6? no
Is the issue reproducible? well... depends... on my system, yes ;-)

Hardware: HP Data Vault X311
Installed using this guide: http://wiki.sabnzbd.org/how-to-install-on-whs

Here's what I've done/tried:
-Disabled AV (WHS Add-In ClamAV)
-Disabled all NIC settings such as float control and stuff
-Set cache to 64M, 150M, ...
-First few 100M load fine. After that, the traffic gets bumpy... doesn't matter if it's less than a GB or a really huge NZB file.
-On other PCs on the same network it's fine, it's just my WHS that's causing me trouble.

All I get from the debug log is "delaying"..., but other users on this forum mentioned that their WHS with similar specs could easily handle max speed (even if I limit my speed to 1000kb/s I get these spikes). CPU usage is not an issue. Any ideas?

[shypike]

So far, all I can say is that I test daily on my (Atom-based) WHS-V1.
I get a slightly disappointing, but stable 5 MBytes/sec from it.
What's your average speed, is it what you would expect?
The 150MB article cache is a good value.

BTW: the "delaying" means that the article decoder/assembler cannot
keep up with the downloader.
This might mean that one or both of these might be true:
The CPU is too slow to do the yEnc decoding.
The disk is slow (at least slower than required to keep up with downloading).

[bagstone]

I would also expect around 5MByte/s. I've got 50Mbit internet, so ~6MB/s is pretty much my limit, which I always hit on my other machines. But I would even be satisfied with something like 2MB/s. Right now, the average speed I get is probably around 100-200KB/s (just a guess, not measured).

Disk too slow can't be true; two brand new and healthy 2TB hard drives.
CPU too slow sounds unrealistic, since it never goes beyond 20-30% on any of the 4 cores during download.

[shypike]

You CPU is even slightly better than mine.
Where do you store your temporary files?
Straight on the D: drive and not on a \\server\share path or such a thing mounted on a drive letter?

[bagstone]

Yeah, I set D:\usenet as base folder.

Thanks for your help, I Google'd for days and couldn't find any solution, but I don't seem to be the only one to have this problem. Hopefully this will help others, too, once we figured out what the problem is.

[shypike]

Which Usenet provider do you have?

[bagstone]

Astraweb.

[shypike]

Hmmmm, I have mixed experiences with Astraweb.
Mostly it works OK, but sometimes it gives time-outs like hell and the speed drops accordingly.
Had this about an hour ago, back to normal now.
Enabling my Giganews account on the same SABnzbd instance restored original speed immediately,
so it wasn't my ISP.

[bagstone]

Hm. That's an issue I can't check... but here's what I did: Started SABnzbd on my laptop (working fine), then on my WHS, and then on my other laptop (also fine)... is this possible, that this Astraweb issue just happens to occur on one of my machines? Sounds unlikely to me.

[shypike]

It happened to me for all machines (during that time).
Somehow it seems that AstraWeb has a longer memory when you use too many threads.
It could also have been a coincidence.
As a last effort you could get a free trial account from Giganews.
To rule out provider influence.

[bagstone]

Thanks, didn't know there was a trial. Well, unfortunately... it's the same result. So it's not the provider. :-( (But also :-) since Giganews seems to be way more expensive)

[shypike]

Sorry, I'm out of ideas now.
BTW: Supernews is the cheaper brother of Giganews.
Don't forget to cancel, otherwise GN will charge you any way.

[bagstone]

Well, I forgot to pause my downloads this afternoon, and realized that the overall speed was not too bad at least for one file (2.5M) and about 900k for the others. That's damn slow but still better than nothing. I just want my WHS to download while I'm at work. If I need something immediately I'll download using my laptop (or maybe I'll even try setting up my WD TV Live, read some articles that there's a NZB client integrated in the custom firmware).

But I'll keep looking for solutions, if anyone has another idea just shoot; if I find the cause of the problem, I'll post it here.