Obtain faster downloads - High Speed ISP conntections only

[mike929]

I have a general question. I seen a few suggestions on how to get faster download speeds. I wanted to see what speeds others are getting.

Setup:
W8
Asus G75vw - 8gb Ram
ISP - Comcast 100down/20up


NIC is receiving over 100+MB


hmmm, now that I look at my screenshot...it would seem my disk might be my bottleneck. I have been meaning to pick up an SSD and swap it in place of the 1TB drive.

[shypike]

Did you set an article cache in Config->General?
Make it 50% larger than the biggest RAR segment file that you expect.
SABnzbd won't use more than whan it needs to buffer one or two files.

[mike929]

Article cache size is set to 200M

[sander]

You have Comcast 100 Mbps, and you get 10 MB/s (= 100 Mbps) with SABnzbd ... so I would say that's perfect?

[sabex]

You have Comcast 100 Mbps, and you get 10 MB/s (= 100 Mbps) with SABnzbd ... so I would say that's perfect?

There are 8 bits in a byte, not 10 -- divide by 8. Therefore, Comcast 105mbps should be yielding 13MB/s+.

I however can't seem to get SAB to go over 9-10MB/s. I lowered the cache from the 200M default to 120M and I'm still not realizing full potential. I think it might have something to do with 50MB file sets finishing before they are able to get up to speed. I've tried scaling from 10 connections to 40 and the result is the same. When I was on 50mbps, SAB had no problem saturating my line. There's definitely some sort of threshold not letting it hit 13MB/s

Anyone out there with a 100mbps line that is able to pull 12.5MB/s consistently?

[shypike]

100 MBps is about the total bit stream.
Ethernet messages and internet packages contain a lot of overhead.
SABnzbd counts the actual useful bytes that come in, so would most software.
My 100 MBps connection delivers just below 11 MBytes/sec on sufficiently powerful hardware.
That is the maximum useful amount of data you can download from a 100 MBps connection.

Connection speed measurement sites show you Mbps, but that's just an approximation based on counting bytes the way SABnzbd does.

[sander]

You have Comcast 100 Mbps, and you get 10 MB/s (= 100 Mbps) with SABnzbd ... so I would say that's perfect?

There are 8 bits in a byte, not 10 -- divide by 8. Therefore, Comcast 105mbps should be yielding 13MB/s+.

I however can't seem to get SAB to go over 9-10MB/s.

Maybe a good moment for you to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model so that you don't mix rates at Physical Layer and Application Layer. See the Layer model in the upper right corner of that wiki page.

[sabex]

I guess I'm just surprised that when I was on 50mbps, I got the whole amount, whereas 100mbps I don't. Is it safe to assume that the overhead per megabyte increases as the speed increases? Much like how high income people pay higher taxes?

[shypike]

Does the speed also vary with the time of day?
Most ISPs don't deliver max speed at all times of the day.

[sabex]

I only upgraded to 105mbps yesterday. With 50mbps, time of day didn't matter. Perhaps 105mbps is a larger draw on the network?

[sander]

I only upgraded to 105mbps yesterday. With 50mbps, time of day didn't matter. Perhaps 105mbps is a larger draw on the network?

If you want measure end-to-end network speed, I would advice you to use http://www.speedtest.net/

HTH

[sabex]

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3616106676

It appears that the smaller the RARs are, the slower it will be. For instance, with 15MB split RARs, I only averaged 8.0MB/s. I also tested this seconds after the speed test above. Perhaps SAB could be tweaked in a way to start the next RAR before the previous finishes?

[shypike]

[quote="sabex" Perhaps SAB could be tweaked in a way to start the next RAR before the previous finishes?[/quote]

It already does.
It is possible that one post uses larger Usenet articles than another.
Also, on many servers old posts are slower than recent posts.

[pieszz]

it's not sab - its something else. I have 120mbit and pull 14,5-14,8MB/s constantly any time of day even while extracting

[sabex]

Perhaps it's a limitation on my server hardware or HDD. Thanks for the response pieszz.