What's your fastest D/L speed?

[cjedj]

Does sabnzbd have a maximum download speed, or should it just saturate your connection?

I get a theoretical 100 Mbit/s from my ISP (at least, that's how they advertise it). Using speedtest.net and my ISP's test tool I average about 800 - 900 Mbit/s. However downloads from Astraweb using sabnzbd average around 5MB/s.

Am I missing some potential download speed here or does that sound about right to you guys? (I always end up confusing myself with the bits / bytes / factor of 10 calculations... )


EDIT: Just done a bit more reading and have seen people getting far higher speeds using sabnzbd, so it can obviously handle the speed.
So I see two options:

a) I'm actually maxing out my connection, and I've just calculated the MBit/s MB/s difference incorrectly (very likely).
or
b) The slowdown is coming from Astraweb.

Can anyone more knowledgeable cast any light on this?

SECOND EDIT:

By the way, I've got the cache set at 120M and have python-yenc installed as per wiki, so that should be OK.

[shypike]

There are several bottlenecks.

Your raw ISP speed (or rather the real speed they give which is always lower than what they advertise)

The speed of your Usenet provider
Some give the best speed with many connections, with some with just a few.
You'll need to experiment.
Also they don't always keep their promises.

Your router, can it handle the speed. Especially when it uses "Statefull inspection".

Your system speed. SABnzbd is a bit too CPU hungry.
Slow disks can also be a bottleneck, but not often.
A proper article cache will eliminate the disk bottleneck mostly.

[cjedj]

There are several bottlenecks.

Your raw ISP speed (or rather the real speed they give which is always lower than what they advertise)

The speed of your Usenet provider
Some give the best speed with many connections, with some with just a few.
You'll need to experiment.
Also they don't always keep their promises.

Your router, can it handle the speed. Especially when it uses "Statefull inspection".

Your system speed. SABnzbd is a bit too CPU hungry.
Slow disks can also be a bottleneck, but not often.
A proper article cache will eliminate the disk bottleneck mostly.

Thanks for the reply. I think I can eliminate the ISP speed (as I say, I've tested it at an average of around 800-900 Mbit/s), and I've got the cache set at 120M. I've monitored the CPU when using sabnzbd, and it never gets anywhere near 100%. The machine is a new 2010 Mac Mini, (2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4MB RAM), so there's a decent amount of power there. The router is an Apple Time Capsule (bought 2009) connected via Ethernet, so again I think that should be able to handle the connection.

That leaves Astraweb as a possible bottleneck. I use 20 connections normally - I tested a few files this morning with that dialled back to 15 and then 10 with no noticeable difference in average speed. I also opened a ticket with their helpdesk, and got the reply that there's no slowdown on their end, they should easily be able to max out my connection. But then they would say that, right?!

Not sure what else to try. Maybe I'll throttle the connections back to 5 and see if that changes anything...

If anybody else has any suggestions please feel free to add them!

[shypike]

Download performance in Linux and OSX looks to be slower than on Windows.
The most likely cause is that the TCP/IP socket libraries we use and the way
we use them do less well on OSX/Linux than on Windows.
We are looking at this, but it's tough going.
My own Windows system is able to get to 11 MByte/second over a 100MBit fiber connection.
This is the maximum.

[cjedj]

Interesting info, thanks for that.

[ATLChris]

I am getting around 2.0.5 MB/s with Charter Communications and Power Usenet.

[jollande]

http://speedtest.ookla.com/result/979244590.png

I use Astraweb with 50 connections, SAB seems to average out around 7.6 MB/s

Not sure though, do these numbers look correct?

[Foxfire]

http://speedtest.ookla.com/result/979244590.png

I use Astraweb with 50 connections, SAB seems to average out around 7.6 MB/s

Not sure though, do these numbers look correct?

According to the speedtest you have a ~100 mbit connection, so I think you should be getting a bit more than 7.6 MB/s. I get ~6 MB/s on 50/50 Mbit (14 connections @ Astraweb). Try lowering your connections, 50 is not needed and might in fact hurt your download I think.

[MageMinds]

In Quebec Canada, I have a 12 mbits cable and I max out my Internet with UsenerServer.com and 8 connections. I have a QoS router that choke the Internet at 11 mbits and it lower priority on bluk traffic so I'm getting 1.22 MB/s (9.75 mbits), but my Asterisk SIP phone server works flawlessly, even after 3 even 4 concurrent calls.

For the record, my router is pfSense.

UsenerServer.com seem to have some sort of layer of storage, when you download old posts they are slower than newer posts. I'm downloading right now a 425 days post and  it download at only 800~900 KB/s, if I pause it to let other more recent stuff download, it climb back to 1.22 MB/s

edit: Finally it's been confirmed they have a archive server that is a little bit slower for older posts, that are old and not asked often, I suspect that if someone try to download the same thing I just did they will get greater speed, because the posts have been moved back from archive to the live nntp server. That's a clever way to keep costs down while keeping a fast service for about 99% of the time and still serve old stuff.

[xeonicxpression]

I have a 16Mbit connection from charter internet.  I max my connection every time using astraweb.  I always get between 2.0 and ~2.13.  I have it setup to use 10 connections to the US server and set as a backup 10 connections to the EU server.  I know I don't need that many, but they give me 20 so I figure wth why not.  My server doesn't skip a beat using that many.

[dc2447]

No ones quoted their speeds from the UK yet, so I will share mine.

I download at a constant 50Mbps. (6.25MBps) (yeh, Mbps is a factor of 8 not 10).

Im on Virgin Media's 50Mb cable service and am downloading from Giganews, although I find 10 connection (out of 50) is enough to give me my stable constant speed.

That speed is of course reliant on that system being the only system on the internet of course, when i get other systems doing things like playing games, watchin online videos and the like then it slows way down to about 46Mbps (5.75MBps).

are you using the stock Virgin Modem and router?  No matter what I do I am getting 6Mbit, plenty of others in the same boat on the Virgin support forums.

I'd love to get better speeds.

[jollande]

http://speedtest.ookla.com/result/979244590.png

I use Astraweb with 50 connections, SAB seems to average out around 7.6 MB/s

Not sure though, do these numbers look correct?

According to the speedtest you have a ~100 mbit connection, so I think you should be getting a bit more than 7.6 MB/s. I get ~6 MB/s on 50/50 Mbit (14 connections @ Astraweb). Try lowering your connections, 50 is not needed and might in fact hurt your download I think.

That would explain why i'm constantly getting too many connection warnings. Thanks, i'll try lowering

[barlow]

I got 14,5 MB/s from Astraweb's EU servers with 10 threads. This is quite close to the 120Mbit limit of my connection.

[jollande]

My own Windows system is able to get to 11 MByte/second over a 100MBit fiber connection.
This is the maximum.

I cant understand where mine is slowing down.

Ive tried setting the cache to 120.
Lowered connections from 50 down as low as 8 where the max speed went from 7.6MB/s down to 2.2MB/s.

It's now set to 40 where it's improved, but still limited to around 6 or 7MB/s max.

On RapidShare i get 11MB/s occasionally 9-10MB/ on average though.

Here is my connection http://speedtest.ookla.com/result/979244590.png
SAB is running on W7 32 Ult , C2D E6750 @2.66GHz and 4.0GB RAM

Any ideas ?? (have read and re-read the wiki manual btw.

[breedingh8]

11.3-12.4 MB/s is the fastest i can get SAB to go! I've posted another thread asking for assistance on this. I can download a test file
Saving to: `100mb.test'

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 22.9M/s in 4.6s

as you can see from the same server running SAB at 22.9 MB/s but for some reason SAB will not got past an average of 11.3MB/s !