My Bandwidth Is Having A N.D.E.

[efective]

I’m back . . . . . LOL

My problem was my anti-virus – Kaspersky. I’d never heard of Ports in my life until Jaapf said to disable a certain Port within my anti-virus settings.

I’ve changed back to server 119 and disabled that Port within Kaspersky. My Bandwidth is now stable. It averages about 200 – 350 KB/S which I am very happy about.

With regards to GrabIt – I never used any anti-virus software when I ran that; it was only last weekend that I bought Kaspersky so to answer your question, no I didn’t have this problem then. What I will say, is that Usenet Explorer downloads a lot quicker that GrabIt and now that I know how to use it (a little) I prefer it. However, GrabIt has a much friendlier GUI.

Thanks to you both for you continued patience and support to this newbie. I learned a lot and I hope you guys learnt something too.

Thanks,
E

[nyquil67]

Just tossing this in, I found out that my ISP was limiting the speed on certain ports, my downloads from giganews were crawling, just switching the port caused my speeds to jump to the maximum my connection would allow. I've run many versions of kaspersky and recently nod32, and outside of cpu usage spikes, I've not had these programs affect my download speeds in any meaningful way. I saw that you had luck with changing the ports, you may want to see if there are any other ports your usenet provider supports and see how it affects your speed.

[efective]

nyquil67,

Thanks for the advice!

I switched to Port 443 initally but reverted back to Port 119 after I found out it was Kaspersky that was giving me problems and not my ISP. I had great downloading speeds with Port 119 but I did notice that it would drop to 45 KB/S for awhile during a download session and then jump back-up to 245 KB/S . . . I switched to Port 443 and I've not looked back.

I do have one question that hopefully you can help with. I got my Newsgroups set-up but I wish to increase the amount of Headers they can hold, how do I do this?

Regards,
E

[Josef K]

I do have one question that hopefully you can help with. I got my Newsgroups set-up but I wish to increase the amount of Headers they can hold, how do I do this?

Properties->Newsgroups, select 'Default' at the top and then change the 'Retention/Dates [range]' or 'Headers per server' to whatever your needs or hard drive will accomodate. You should find what the retention is on your server(s) and not set it longer than this as you'd not be able to retrieve the articles anyway.

Bear in mind that if you have changed these settings independently for any other groups, these will override the Default settings. You can adjust for different groups where you may want to hold the headers longer for one set of groups and expire them sooner for others.

As long as you chose Compact Binary as the group type when you first subscribed to groups then you should be fine storing millions of headers because Compact Binary is optimised for this scenario. If you chose one of the other types you will notice binary groups will drain resources on your computer very quickly due to having lots of headers.

[efective]

Last night I was averaging 250 KB/S but tonight I’m averaging 25 KB/S. What would account for such a difference in download speeds? I’ve got to say it’s really annoying!

I’ve unchecked the Port protection 443 within my Kaspersky Antivirus software. With U.E. my Max Tasks is set to 8 as that’s how many connections my Newsgroups allow to their servers. My Retention/Dates [range] is set to 71 as that’s how many days my Newsgroups retains for. My Total Tasks under the “Tasks” heading is set to 50.

I have a firewall – ZoneAlarm – is that affecting my download speed? Then again, why does it stay for hours at 250 KB/S.

Regards,
E

[jaapf]

Could it be time related?
I mean, could it be that your ISP has problems with heavy loads at certain times?

[efective]

I've spoken with my ISP and they operate a Fair Usage Policy which kinda sucks . . .

Fair Usage Policy

The Pipex Homecall Fair Usage Policy is designed to make sure your broadband service is quick and reliable whenever you use it.
Our Fair Usage tool automatically identifies the very small number of extremely heavy users and manages their bandwidth only during peak hours (6pm to 11pm Monday to Sunday, inc Bank Holidays), to protect the service for all our other customers. Outside peak hours, the use of the Internet by these heavy users is unaffected.


What happens to your broadband service if you are affected by the Fair Usage Policy?

During peak hours (6pm to 11pm Monday to Sunday, inc Bank Holidays), customers affected by the Fair Usage Policy will share bandwidth with each other and will be separated from other customers. The total amount of bandwidth available for affected customers to share will be at least as much as for those customers unaffected by the policy.

The speed that affected customers experience when downloading at peak hours will therefore depend on what other affected customers are doing. If they are all web-browsing and reading emails, then all affected customers experience normal broadband speed. If, on the other hand, they are using Peer-to-Peer or file-sharing software, they will experience slow broadband speed. Outside of peak hours, no restrictions will apply.
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Thanks to everyone for your help!

E