Usenet Explorer

When I try to get new headers in alt.binaries.multimedia on my ISP newsserver with NewsPro, it takes forever to get them all. However, if I try to get all headers in the same group in Agent, it downloaded 59000 headers in less then 2 minutes. After almost an hour, I'm still waiting for NewsPro to finish with the same group. I have NewsPro setup for my ISP newsservers as well as the Newsfeeds.com servers. Since NewsPro usually takes so long to download all the headers from multiple servers, I usually try to get headers from my ISP servers first, then the Newsfeeds servers after those headers are downloaded. The Newsfeeds servers have days longer retention than my local ISP's newsserver, which is RoadRunner, if that makes a difference.

Is the long download time of the headers due to having the single large database for the group or is there a setting somewhere that I'm missing that will speed up the download times of these headers? This seems to be a problem in all the large binary groups that I subscribe to. I tend to use NewsPro for these groups exclusively, to take advantage of the multiserver support. When I'm downloading the actual articles, thruput seems to be the same between newsreaders.

When you download headers from several servers the time required to finish the task (at best) is proportional to the number of servers (when all bandwidth is utilized). "Finish" means download headers from the slowest server, downloading them from fast servers could had been completed a long time ago.

Try to download headers only from the server (expand the newsgroup, select the server and invoke get new headers from the context menu) if the time is about the same not much can be done. If it is significantly slower - try to increase properties->tasks->prevent overload, limit to or temporarily uncheck it alltogether.

If it is slow check whether processor usage is 100% or the opposite e.g. processor usage is low but there is a lot of disk activity, in the latter case what is the approximate number of headers in the database and how much RAM your computer has?

If you have another processor intensive process running at the time on the normal priority - uncheck properties->tasks, below normal priority for network threads.

To reduce the number of download sources you may use the message-id direct option (to not download headers from all servers), there was a good discussion how to use the option but on the old forum, if someone using it with binnews maybe he will explain.

another thought here is if you look at everything once a day then your retension can be cut back to 3 or 4 days which reduces data an speeds up the get header proccess .