SABnzbd Forums

I live in the Philippines and recently just upgraded my Internet connection to 100Mbps Fiber. I just noticed that when I download from my Usenet provider (NewsHosting) using Sab, I only get around half the speed of my subscription considering I already use 30 connections. I know this server farm is located in the USA and distance is possibly the limiting factor here but I just downloaded an Nvidia GPU driver from a US server as well and I get the full speed. I also tried downloading using 10 and 20 connections and it seems that the 30 connections (max allowed on my subscription) gives me the fastest speed.

I tried using another newsreader (NH's newsreader) and it gives me the same speed. I have enough RAM and CPU and are not really being bottlenecked. Article cache limit is already set to 450M in Sab.

Here's a result of my testing to different NH servers:

Doing 30 connections to news.newshosting.com @ port 119 resulted to a 6MBps download speed (which is around 60Mbps out of my 100Mbps connection)
Doing 30 connection to news.fr7.newshosting.com @ port 119 resulted to a 3MBps download speed (which is around 30Mbps out of my 100Mbps connection)
Doing 30 connection to news.ams.newshosting.com @ port 119 resulted to a 700KBps download speed (which is around 7Mbps out of my 100Mbps connection)

What do you think is the problem here?

Try splitting your connections with their EU server as well. Or add a secondary primary provider.

Also, you could look at Giganews which has a Hong Kong server for Asian customers. You'll have to ask them about it directly, because they don't publicly offer it.

I already tried splitting the connections with theit EU servers and the resulting speed was even slower.

So is this really a problem with geographical location of servers and nothing in Sab?

kevindd992002 wrote:
So is this really <snip> nothing in Sab?

You already answered that yourself:

I tried using another newsreader (NH's newsreader) and it gives me the same speed.

Yes, I got that. But I was wondering if there's a specific setting in both newsreaders that's limiting my speed?

kevindd992002 wrote:Yes, I got that. But I was wondering if there's a specific setting in both newsreaders that's limiting my speed?

Probably not in the newsreaders.

Possible causes:
- ISP speed / throttling
- hardware
- network
- (and as you say) distance / delay

Did you contact Newshosting? Mention that you use the Newshosting newsreader

I don't think my ISP is throttling anything as I can get full speeds when I download from Nvidia's website (through HTTP). Using port 80 in Usenet still caps the speed at half the full speed.

I also don't think it's the hardware and network for the same reason above.

So I think we're left with distance and delay. I did contact Newshosting and I have an open ticket with them but I figured to post a thread here as well.

Out of curiosity: What is your ping time?

I get 3.5 ms on my fiber connection, from the 'ams' server ... probably AMSterdam, as I'm in the Netherlands.
If I use a different nameserver, I get a different name and IP address: ... with 30 times bigger ping: 100ms:

Yeah, news.newshosting.com seems to be a CNAME (Alias) for the other three A records depending on the region. For mine, it translates to news.iad.newshosting.com. Let me get a snippet of the ping times and I'll post back.

This could also be interesting: in your sabnzbd.log search the line with 'happyeyeballs' as it will tell which IP address was used for the newsserver:
So: the usenet connect only took 3 msec. That's fast.

It says microseconds actually, so usec which is even faster and insane. What I'm thinking about this is a DNS lookup result that's already in the cache of either my local DNS or my computer's local cache which is why it took that fast. What do you think?

kevindd992002 wrote:It says microseconds actually, so usec which is even faster and insane. What I'm thinking about this is a DNS lookup result that's already in the cache of either my local DNS or my computer's local cache which is why it took that fast. What do you think?

Ouch. I wrote that code myself in SABnzbd ... it's a mistake; it was "msec", and later changed it incorrectly to microsec instead of milisec.

I'll change it in the SABnzbd code.

That's what I thought, good catch though.

So is that speed the connection to the server itself or just DNS lookup for the A record IP address result?

kevindd992002 wrote:That's what I thought, good catch though.

So is that speed the connection to the server itself or just DNS lookup for the A record IP address result?

A DNS lookup plus a TCP connection (but no NNTP application layer stuff)

Ok. That is indeed fast then. Here's what I have for pings:

---cut---
Pinging news.iad.newshosting.com [69.16.179.29] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 69.16.179.29: bytes=32 time=246ms TTL=50
Reply from 69.16.179.29: bytes=32 time=247ms TTL=50
Reply from 69.16.179.29: bytes=32 time=246ms TTL=50
Reply from 69.16.179.29: bytes=32 time=247ms TTL=50

Ping statistics for 69.16.179.29:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 246ms, Maximum = 247ms, Average = 246ms
---cut---

---cut---
Pinging news.ams.newshosting.com [81.171.92.238] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 81.171.92.238: bytes=32 time=335ms TTL=49
Reply from 81.171.92.238: bytes=32 time=335ms TTL=49
Reply from 81.171.92.238: bytes=32 time=334ms TTL=49
Reply from 81.171.92.238: bytes=32 time=334ms TTL=49

Ping statistics for 81.171.92.238:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 334ms, Maximum = 335ms, Average = 334ms
---cut---

---cut---
Pinging news.fr7.newshosting.com [81.171.118.134] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 81.171.118.134: bytes=32 time=353ms TTL=48
Reply from 81.171.118.134: bytes=32 time=346ms TTL=48
Reply from 81.171.118.134: bytes=32 time=353ms TTL=48
Reply from 81.171.118.134: bytes=32 time=350ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 81.171.118.134:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 346ms, Maximum = 353ms, Average = 350ms
---cut---

So yeah, I have crappy latency to the servers but that shouldn't explain the slow download speed. Sustained download speeds are not affected by pings. For what's it worth, here's what I have for Nvidia's download server:

Pinging a1437.d.akamai.net [96.7.54.107] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 96.7.54.107: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=51
Reply from 96.7.54.107: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=51
Reply from 96.7.54.107: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=51
Reply from 96.7.54.107: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 96.7.54.107:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 30ms, Maximum = 32ms, Average = 31ms