SABnzbd Forums

I have Astraweb and UsenetServer and i've tried using both individually and both at the same time, and i'm noticing on some NZBs I get only 700k/s to 2MB/s. When SickBeard sends a file over and sets it to high priority, it goes at 12MB/s, then right back to 700k/s 2MB/s for the other file. These are 50GB files, so it takes awhile at these speeds.

I look in my connections and if I keep refreshing the page it seems like they are constantly dropping. It says 20 connections for both usenet clients, however one refresh it will be empty (but still say 20), the next i'll actually see the articles, and the next it will be empty again.

Seems like it's having trouble staying connected?

Any ideas?

Having two times 20 connections is not efficient,
please scale down.
Some servers get older posts from another provider, which takes longer.
Your system may not be able to keep up with the download speed.

shypike wrote:Having two times 20 connections is not efficient,
please scale down.
Some servers get older posts from another provider, which takes longer.
Your system may not be able to keep up with the download speed.

My system is:
i7 920 @ 4.2GHz
6GB DDR3 2000
I have 2x 1TB WD Blacks in RAID 0 that can maintain ~270MB/s reads/writes dedicated just for SABnzbd/Usenet, I just double checked this with 2 different benchmarks.

If that system can't handle it, very few home computers could. Doesn't matter how many connections I use, 5, 10, 20, 40, same thing on some NZBs.. it's the same speeds. I've tried every SSL port that is allowed, and a total of 3 usenet providers (astraweb, usenetserver, and i just tried supernews). They all get the same speed.

I just moved another 50GB NZB to the top of the list and it downloaded at 10+MB/s, then as soon as it went back to the other NZB it's right back down to <1MB/s. This proves my system/internet is fine unless i'm not understanding something. I haven't really had any problems with smaller/newer files, however I haven't really paid much attention to them. I am also paying for a business line that does not throttle or have any caps whatsoever, i've d/led 2+TB in a month many times, and right now i'm <500GB this month.

The file I am trying to download is 648 days old, according to Supernews I should be getting a minimum of 100Mbps on any files, regardless of age assuming my internet is capable of it (which it is). They also are now claiming 100% completition which is a bold claim. This seems to happen a couple times a month where I find a couple NZBs that are just really slow.

The fact that putting the 50GB NZB at the top speeds things up, indicates
that it's the NZBs (or rather the server) that determine the speed.
Usually SABnzbd has more difficulty with 50G files, due to the bigger in-memory overhead.
On your system this is hardly a factor because, as you already stated, it's amply sufficient.

Other than that, I can only list the usual suspects:
- Use a article cache of at least 250M (Config->General)
- Disable the option "Only Get Articles for Top of Queue" in Config->Switches

shypike wrote:The fact that putting the 50GB NZB at the top speeds things up, indicates
that it's the NZBs (or rather the server) that determine the speed.
Usually SABnzbd has more difficulty with 50G files, due to the bigger in-memory overhead.
On your system this is hardly a factor because, as you already stated, it's amply sufficient.

Other than that, I can only list the usual suspects:
- Use a article cache of at least 250M (Config->General)
- Disable the option "Only Get Articles for Top of Queue" in Config->Switches

Thanks, "Only Get Articles for Top of Queue" was already unchecked. I'll set the article cache to 256M.

I'll just deal with it I guess, it'll take 23 hours to download this at these speeds. Hopefully I won't come across many of these, I tend to only download <10 day old files anyway. This is the first one that i've tried to download in the 600+ day range.

Old and less popular posts don't live on the primary servers.

Well I hate to say it but that 10MB/s NZB seems to have been a fluke. I couldn't reproduce it again and a new episode I tried to download was also slow, so I installed a fresh SABnzbd on a secondary computer and it worked fine.

I then reinstalled SABnzbd on my main computer, and what do you, it works fine now. That slow 50GB NZB is now going 10.6MB/s. I've had to do this in the past any clue on what could cause this? This is not the only thing that is different, the connections in SABnzbd are now stable and don't disconnect every couple seconds. When adding a NZB, it's added instantly instead of ~1 minute later for large NZBs.

Seems i'm not the only one:
http://forums.sabnzbd.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9220

EDIT: It started slowing down already again, so I set cache to -1 just to do some testing. It seems for the first 20 minutes or so of 10MB/s at a time, it keeps cache <200MB and correctly writes it to the drives at a good speed. Then after that cache will start to grow up to 500+MB. With 6GB of RAM, this is hardly a issue.. so it may be a solution for me, however it doesn't seem right since my array should be able to handle this without the cache getting too big.

EDIT2: After cache started to grow, it grew up to ~900MB, then it started to go back down. So i'm setting my cache to use a max of 2048M to be on the safe side. Seems to be working now, I just needed to set my cache higher.

There could be a priority issue with the task that assembles articles into files,
but you and the other guy so far are the only ones to report it.
Also, given the speed of your system, I find it hard to see how it could be an issue.
Well, another thing for further investigation...

shypike wrote:There could be a priority issue with the task that assembles articles into files,
but you and the other guy so far are the only ones to report it.
Also, given the speed of your system, I find it hard to see how it could be an issue.
Well, another thing for further investigation...

Edited my above post around the same time you posted. Here's what i'm noticing:
-Cache stays stable at about 150-200MB for the first 20 minutes. Still 10+MB/s.
-Cache starts to grow upward to 900MB. Still 10+MB/s.
-Cache slowly goes back to 150-200MB and stays there for a few minutes. Still 10+MB/s.
-Cache starts to grow again, this time it went up to 1.4GB quickly. This dropped my download down to 6.2MB/s.
-Cache starts to slowly go back down, and with it downloads also increases in speed but never fully recovered. Seem to of stayed stable at around 1.1GB cache.
-Download finished at 7.8MB/s.

What this means i'm unsure, but it seems like if my download took any longer i'd start using even more RAM whenever the next "hiccup" happened. It seems like something is getting bogged down by fast downloads. Just to test if this was my hard drive or not, I attempt transferring a large file to the drive while the cache was bogged down in SABnzbd. I got over 100MB/s, so drives have the capability to write out these cached files, but they just aren't.

I understand my situation is pretty rare, not many users are downloading at these speeds. I'm sure if I cap my download at about 5-7MB/s it would be fine. I consider this acceptable with lows of 6.2MB/s and highs of 10MB/s, but if this is a problem with SABnzbd and can be fixed, that's always welcomed too.

I download at the same speed, but rarely 50G items.
And I don't babysit them
There are some issues with items above 25G, but I haven't seen this.