A peculiarity I've noticed about the program and/or my computer is that I get better speed with 8-9 streams going (versus the 15 I started off with). I have Newsfeeds, so I had the 15 streams going thinking I would get better speed that way.
Is there a practical limit, either based on the services, software, or computers, to the number of streams that will provide the optimum speed? Has anyone else noticed this?
I have NewsFeeds as well and I think you'll discover that you get three streams per server. If you see nine running it's because you're using three servers.
The number of streams had me confused for a bit as well until I clicked on the individual streams in the Task Manager.
The speed decrease you see when running with 15 streams instead of 9 could be caused by a by a number of things, including your computer, your network, your cable provider or your nntp provider (newsfeeds).
With the computer, each additional stream will require more resources, memory and processor time. Reinstalling windows, adding more RAM or a faster processor could help. If you computer feels sluggish with all 15 streams running at once, then the computer is something to look at.
The speed of your network and the amount of activity on it will affect how fast data gets to your computer, as will the topology. You typically have 40% of your ethernet network capacity available to you, the rest is consumed by the network protocol overhead. Token Ring is 90%, FDDI about 97%. So If you have a 100Mbs Enternet network, you are getting about 40Mbs, but yout cable modem is probably 10Mbs, so you get 4Mbs and the more streams you open up compete for this space, along with other traffic on the network.
Your cable provider may cap your connection at a certain bandwidth, or with DSL the distance from the central office may limit your speed. For my instance I am supposedly capped at 3Mbs inbound and 256Kbs outbound althought I have seen it peak above this.
Your nntp(news) provider may capped your service with a maximum throughtput from each server or stream. The Newsfeeds FAQ asks that question, but the answer only shows limits on the amount of data downloaded.
My trial period has ended and I am waiting for my code so I can't get into NewsPro and check, but considering how well thought out it is, there should be a way to tell it to only use 9 feeds and any one time, and then you can set the servers to use as many feeds as allowed. That way if NewsPro needs 3 feeds from the MP3 server it will be able to open them for you.
With Newsfeeds I imagine most users can get great speeds using less than 8 or 9 streams. I use only four as my maximum but can easily max my connection using even one or two.
Thanks for all the replies so far. I do know how to set the number of streams overall and the number of streams per server in Newspro, so the thing I'm observing is a result of these settings. Today, with 15 streams going across Newshosting and Newsfeeds, my speed was 180 KB/s. I cut it down to 9 and the speed jumped to 373 KB/s (or about 3 Mbps for the mathematically challenged). My cable modem connection is 3.5 Mbps capped, connected through a router with 4 other computers, but I watch when speed dips to be sure that no other computer is using the resource.
As far as computer, I have an AMD 1800 with 1.5 GB of RAM (RAM is cheap). I am jealous of Lunatik and the speed he can achieve with Newsfeeds, as there are some servers I have good luck with, but some that have been very very sluggish lately.
The effect is real, could still be related to the computer, router, cable pipe, etc, I'll keep reading here for ideas, and, for now, keep Newspro's limits set to 8-10 streams.
Anyone with the time or inclination to fiddle with these settings, let me know your results.
Don't be jealous of the speeds I get. I'm on a DSL (gaming) connection - great ping times in games, never any spikes; but not nearly as fast for downloading files as the cable connections offered in this area. My DSL maxes at about 67K/sec downstream.
Nice topic! I've been experimenting passionatelly with maximizing NewsPro D/L bandwith for months now, and I've caught a tip or two on the way.
I have OptimumOnline cable connection (East Coast) and I tweaked TCP/IP settings to the max (on all five computers in my home and home office) using tips from DSL Reports, so that I regularly have 900 KBs to 1MBs D/L speed (maximum was 1.08 steady from Netscape FTP). I used to have SMC Barricade AWBR-7004 router, but it kept cutting my bandwith to a half, so I dumped it, and switched to multihomed Win2K Server with ISA 2K "proxy server". Computer that I dedicate for NewsPro changes constatly, depending on which parts I need at the moment for various computer projects, or helping friends, or my consulting practice customers. Right now is ridiculously slow Celeron 450 with 512MB RAM and pretty slow UDMA-33 HDD, so my bigest bottleneck is during saving attachments, because articles get downloaded few times faster than poor NewsPro gets them decoded and saved.
Never mind that, topic is about number of simultaneous streams... I use Newsfeeds too and exclusively for binaries (LOTS of them!), and on a perfect day (mostly excluding last month and a half after their servers reorganization) I manage to pull between 850 KB/s and 1000 KB/s of articles and/or headers, as per NewsPro Task Manager. But I constantly "micromanage" NewsPro (as Tha*Lunat!k correctly referenced that once), by reorganizing server priorities, subsets, number of tasks, compensating for server delays, detaching and attaching different servers to different groups, etc... My "sweet spot" so far have been with between 10 and 15 article tasks and 6 to 9 header tasks (on higher priority).
90% of my downloads belong to Watch/Auto filters, so when scheduler kicks for new headers in watched groups, number of article tasks normally drops while header tasks are running for any given server (3 task per server Newsfeed limit), and I've also noticed that overall bandwith always drops then, until headers finish and articles again fill up all slots. That's probably due to what Alex calls "overload" with new unprocessed headers, and slowness of my computer which is not able to keep up with storing new headers and downloading new articles at the same time.
I do plan to switch NewsPro to a much faster computer with UDMA-133 controller and TWO HDDs (one to host database and another to host decoded and saved attachments), but I'm just lazy to do it. It's also called "if ain't broken, don't fix it" kind of attitude. Anyway, I'm pretty happy puppy with this setup so far, because most of the time I'm able to pull one SVCD in about 20-30 minutes, which I find VERY satisfying! Wouldn't you agree?
I hate fiddling with Newspro more than I have to . . . I was overjoyed when Newsfeeds gave up the 2 server thing, as it let me delete the subsets I had set up. Before that, I was even more overjoyed at Alex's upgrades to the program that made the subsets work much better (adding the max servers was a very good thing to do . . . ).
Still waiting on the results from multiple experiments . . .
A peculiarity I've noticed about the program and/or my computer is that I get better speed with 8-9 streams going (versus the 15 I started off with). I have Newsfeeds, so I had the 15 streams going thinking I would get better speed that way.