SABnzbd Forums

Hi all,

Long time user of SABNZBD (currently on Windows 10) and just as long faced with a, for me, big issue.
Every time, and I do mean every time, when SABNZBD is unpacking a file, the unrar process totally blocks any and all access to the file system. even with relative small archives I am regularly having to sit there watching the busy cursor doing its rotating thing until finally, after a few minutes I can get a single IO request slipped in and whatever program I'm using wanting disk access, unfreezes for a moment to do what it needs to do.

This is particularly aggravating with archives of a few gigabytes, This can often cause the system to be totally unresponsive for a loooong time (10+ minutes is no exception)

That this is really unacceptable is putting it mildly, a competitive unpacker like 7-Zip (ironically also included in the sabnzbd setup) is leaps and bounds more flexible in that at least the standalone unpacker allows me to normally continue what I am doing while it happily unpacks whatever size archive, releasing as many cpu cycles to other process as required to allow the system to run reasonably smooth.

Any chance I can totally exclude this unrar mongrel from being used and have sabnzbd solely use the 7zip unpacker ?

In Config > Switches, enable Advanced Settings and then set External process priority to Idle, this should help I think.

We can't switch to 7Zip because the uploaders keep using more weird stuff that only UnRar really supports. So we are kind of locked to using UnRar. Also, for 99% of people it does work as expected. It really seems to depend on system settings and software like virusscanners to cause such lockups. Usually it just runs silently in the background..