Slow/sporadic downloads
Slow/sporadic downloads
I've been using newspro for a long time, and recently switched to usenet explorer for most of my groups. Today I had to reformat my system hard drive, but I have newspro and UE on another drive. The problem I'm running into, I imported some nzb's for some large multipart downloads into UE, and it will randomly pause when downloading, or stop downloading, and I'm averaging 2.5-40kbytes/sec. If I import the same nzb into Newspro, I get 600kbytes/sec. I've tried changing the network priority, and making sure pause wasn't set, and there wasn't any bandwidth limitations set in UE. What really puzzles me, If I load a newsgroup in UE, and rescan, then attempt to download some bodies, it generally goes very fast, around 400-500kb/s but not consistant. This is all done using giganews. What is wierd about this, it has only been doing this since I reformatted, I didn't touch the settings other than to assign new download locations.
ue and newspro should have the same speed while downloading bodies (including nzb), ue is much faster while downloading headers though.
if the destination directories are different check that hte drive is not too fragmented, although it is not clear how the speed can go so low.
if you tried newspro and ue with different providers it might be provider limiting speed.
if we take a look from firewall side newspro and ue also appear similar, so cannot be difference here (unless firewall has different settings regarding the two programs).
also check UE console maybe there are some errors there, errors may slow down downloads (like when it fails several times because server returns error).
if the destination directories are different check that hte drive is not too fragmented, although it is not clear how the speed can go so low.
if you tried newspro and ue with different providers it might be provider limiting speed.
if we take a look from firewall side newspro and ue also appear similar, so cannot be difference here (unless firewall has different settings regarding the two programs).
also check UE console maybe there are some errors there, errors may slow down downloads (like when it fails several times because server returns error).
Everything was set identicle, I did have a download going in UE that the nzb had too many parts per body, and it was causing me to exceed my maximum of 10 connections. However when I realized this, I switched to a different download and canceled the problematic one, and I did not get any errors in the console downloading to the same hard drive. The drive that contains newspro and UE is completely defragmented, and the drive I was downloaded to was as well, and I had 80 gigs free. I'll have to try it in a few days and see if it was a fluke. Does windows treat these programs differently as far as QoS packet scheduling goes? I usually go out of my way to disable this, but as I've just formatted, I haven't had a chance to do more than disable this from the control pannel.
as to network behaviour the programs are identical (only compiled in different compiler versions), there was nothing to invent there.
the main difference between the programs is in header database storage, so ue consumes tens times less of RAM and is many times faster when dealing with large volumes of headers with no practical limit as to number of headers (when using compact binary type) as it was 4.5M headers per instance in newspro, but as to network tasks in the sense of reading/writing through sockets or downloading articles bodies (it includes nzb files) there was not much to change in principle (i'm using a different code base so i still had to rewrite some things) since those tasks are simple so any reasonable implementation will do ok.
maybe a fluke, something caused thrashing, some other applications captured too much resources or some network related driver bug was triggered.
the main difference between the programs is in header database storage, so ue consumes tens times less of RAM and is many times faster when dealing with large volumes of headers with no practical limit as to number of headers (when using compact binary type) as it was 4.5M headers per instance in newspro, but as to network tasks in the sense of reading/writing through sockets or downloading articles bodies (it includes nzb files) there was not much to change in principle (i'm using a different code base so i still had to rewrite some things) since those tasks are simple so any reasonable implementation will do ok.
maybe a fluke, something caused thrashing, some other applications captured too much resources or some network related driver bug was triggered.
I think there is something wrong with my UE install. In addition to the previous problem, I can no longer use the newsgroup search function through newzbin. I get "Search Failed Connection Unexpectadly closed by server UE:20011". A friend who also uses UE is able to search fine using newzbin. I've tripple checked my username and password. The in program diagnostics don't seem to show any problems. I'm thinking I may just have to delete the directory and start from scratch, but I'd hate to loose all my settings and subscribed newsgroup list. If its a network problem on my end causing all of this, it isn't affecting any other programs. I have windows firewall disabled.
do you mean newzbin or UE native search service?
newzbin has pretty crippled interface, the default is i'm running a search server and you are looking on my server, it is not newzbin.
try telnet ueservice.dyndns.org 2020 does it disconnects as well right away or it stays connected?
deleting all settings unlikely to help, you may only check in properties->general->search service that protocol is native, the server and the port are as above.
with server it would most likely return an error string, socket error means the access is blocked for ue. if you may have remnants of an old third party firewall - disabling it may not be enough, with windows firewall should be no problem though.
newzbin has pretty crippled interface, the default is i'm running a search server and you are looking on my server, it is not newzbin.
try telnet ueservice.dyndns.org 2020 does it disconnects as well right away or it stays connected?
deleting all settings unlikely to help, you may only check in properties->general->search service that protocol is native, the server and the port are as above.
with server it would most likely return an error string, socket error means the access is blocked for ue. if you may have remnants of an old third party firewall - disabling it may not be enough, with windows firewall should be no problem though.
I'll give it a shot. UE and Newspro reside on their own hard drive, and all of this has been going on since I had to format my system/c: drive and reinstall xp pro from scratch. I have a newzbin account and always used their search service through UE before the format. I'll double check my anti-virus software to make sure its not blocking things. I use kaspersky anti-virus, but its what I've used for years.
newzbin search service newsreader interface is quite limited, ue native search covers more groups with much more precision. in ue it is implemented "as it is" rather for historic reasons, in their main engine they were using a very old version of ue indexing algorithm which i gave to them in march 2005.
if it is sporadic it may also mean their service for newsreader end is sporadic, check whether the same applies to the native service, servers are completely different i don't have any connection to newzbin.
if it is sporadic it may also mean their service for newsreader end is sporadic, check whether the same applies to the native service, servers are completely different i don't have any connection to newzbin.
The UE search service works fine, it will just take some getting used to. My bigger issue however is still downloading bodies. If I just tag a bunch of files to download, it will get up to about 200kb/s, but averages around 80kb/s. If I rescan a newsgroup, my bandwidth usage jumps up to 613kb/s and the download flies, but as soon as the headers are done, it goes back down to the slow speeds and frequently pauses for 30 seconds at a time. No pause buttons are hit, and no bandwidth limiting is set in the settings. I'd blame giganews if I didn't get flawless performance in Newspro. 613kb/s on bodies at all times. Again this is only since I formated. Its just really frustrating since I really want to completely migrate over to UE from NP.
Sorry for all the problems and thanks for all the help Alex. I think I figured it out. I don't know why the newzbin search doesn't work, but I can live with using their web interface if I need it. I rotated to an alternate port, looks like my ISP is slowing port 119. Luckily giganews allows port 23 as well. I think I had a bad bit of coincidence with my isp changing that at the same time I had to format. Now if I could just set priorities with alt-[1-9] like news pro, but I'll find a way to handle that with keyboard shortcuts eventually.