Usenet Explorer

Hi

I've been using NewsPro for a couple of years and have been very happy with it. Just got back into using it again and installed the latest version.

I've set up a clean instance, with four news servers (newscene, easynews, giganews and newshosting). This instance has a single group within (a.b.dvd).

What happens is, if I choose Get New Headers, NewsPro maxes out my 1.5mbit connection fine. DU Meter is reporting this. Then after about 5 minutes, the speed drops and it doesn't max the connection out anymore. Instead of one big red filled window in DU Meter, I get a lot of tiny burst connections and less than half the bandwidth available.

I don't believe this is due to my ISP, since it I cancel all tasks and then choose Get New Headers again, everything is fine for ~5 minutes.

I know a.b.dvd is a massive group but I cannot get the headers with this problem. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

DT

Thanks for all the replies.

In the absence of any suggestions I guess the solution must be to go out and buy a P4 3.2Ghz, a new motherboard and 4Gb of RAM so NewsPro runs happily; so that's what I am going to do.

dt wrote:
What happens is, if I choose Get New Headers, NewsPro maxes out my 1.5mbit connection fine. DU Meter is reporting this. Then after about 5 minutes, the speed drops and it doesn't max the connection out anymore. Instead of one big red filled window in DU Meter, I get a lot of tiny burst connections and less than half the bandwidth available.

Actually I was looking in here to see if anyone else experienced this too.

I usually don't access groups with very large numbers of headers, so I haven't noticed it before. But today I tried to retrieve headers from a.b. multimedia, and there I noticed the drop. I've tried to cancel and start over again several times, and it's always the same: full speed in the begininng (1.8 mbit here), and then within a couple of minutes it drops to about 350 kbit and remains there.

Doesn't seem to be a RAM problem since I have 768 megs and Task Manager reports there are about 500 megs free RAM available after the drop. CPU load is about 5-20%.

So what's going on here?

Rich

dt wrote:
What happens is, if I choose Get New Headers, NewsPro maxes out my 1.5mbit connection fine. DU Meter is reporting this. Then after about 5 minutes, the speed drops and it doesn't max the connection out anymore. Instead of one big red filled window in DU Meter, I get a lot of tiny burst connections and less than half the bandwidth available.

Actually I was looking in here to see if anyone else experienced this too.

I usually don't access groups with very large numbers of headers, so I haven't noticed it before. But today I tried to retrieve headers from a.b. multimedia, and there I noticed the drop. I've tried to cancel and start over again several times, and it's always the same: full speed in the begininng (1.8 mbit here), and then within a couple of minutes it drops to about 350 kbit and remains there.

Doesn't seem to be a RAM problem since I have 768 megs and Task Manager reports there are about 500 megs free RAM available after the drop. CPU load is about 5-20%.

So what's going on here?

Rich

Sorry about the duplicates but I got a "server error " meesage when I posted the first time, so I didn't believe it went through...

[quote="dt"]Hi

I've been using NewsPro for a couple of years and have been very happy with it. Just got back into using it again and installed the latest version.

I've set up a clean instance, with four news servers (newscene, easynews, giganews and newshosting). This instance has a single group within (a.b.dvd).

What happens is, if I choose Get New Headers, NewsPro maxes out my 1.5mbit connection fine. DU Meter is reporting this. Then after about 5 minutes, the speed drops and it doesn't max the connection out anymore. Instead of one big red filled window in DU Meter, I get a lot of tiny burst connections and less than half the bandwidth available.

I don't believe this is due to my ISP, since it I cancel all tasks and then choose Get New Headers again, everything is fine for ~5 minutes.

I know a.b.dvd is a massive group but I cannot get the headers with this problem. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

DT[/quote]

Check the overload option. There's a setting whereby NP will slow down to a pre-determined rate if NP is backlogged in dealing with headers.

I am also experiencing the header slowdown. First time in many years of using newspro. Only when downloading huge groups like a.b.svcd ect. I drop down to 5kbps . I used a competitors product just to see if this might be caused be my weak system but it did not replicate using that product. I like newspro and would like to continue using it so any advice would be appreciated.

Bodach wrote: Check the overload option. There's a setting whereby NP will slow down to a pre-determined rate if NP is backlogged in dealing with headers.

That did it. Thanks!

Do you mean turn this option ON or OFF? Mine is off, and any time after I initially get all the headers to a large group, subsequent header retrieval is painfully slow even from the get go, with the hard drive thrashing non-stop. Even a small header increase can take all night for the process to complete which makes it almost useless.

There's two major bottlenecks you need to check -- Hard drive and RAM.

From your limited system description I'd say it's 90% hard drive throughput related (hard drive access constantly on) and 10% lack of RAM (constant hard drive access could be both page file and writing to the newspro database)

I tried putting newspro on a 7200RPM ATA100 drive and any operations on large newsgroups crawled. I moved it back to a 10k RPM SCSI drive, and it flew like the wind.

While having the extra processing power of a new system wouldn't hurt, the major bottleneck will be hard drive access. If you can scrounge up an old 9 or 18 gig 10k+ rpm scsi drive (they're pretty cheap these days) you can squeeze out a little more life from your old system.

Before my processor(s) blew, I was running newspro on a Dual PIII 550Mhz (NP only used the one processor 90% of the time) and it performed well. I noticed a small speed increase when I upped my RAM from 512 to 1 gig, but not as much as the difference between an IDE and SCSI drive.

The prevent overload option would always be tripped on my older system. The only drawback of not having it enabled (that I found) is that once the headers are finished downloading, Newspro took a long time to completely process them (before you saw them in the newsgroup window).

I am unsure what ill effects will occur by not having this enabled on older systems.