incomplete download

[shypike]

Time-out should be OK, but it sure looks like an issue at the provider side.
The only way to prove (or disprove) is to use other software and download the same "trouble" NZB.
BTW: with three retries and a time-out of 120 sec, SABnzbd will take 6 minutes before declaring
an article missing.

[eydaimon]

The only way to prove (or disprove) is to use other software and download the same "trouble" NZB.

I tried a different nzb downloader and it worked perfectly. It downloaded what it could, got the par files, and repaired the rest.

[shypike]

Forgot to ask. Are you using Astraweb?
If not, which one?

[eydaimon]

Forgot to ask. Are you using Astraweb?
If not, which one?

Yes, astraweb

[shypike]

Of course...
Can you email me one or more of the troublesome NZB files?
Do you use the EU or US server?
Please email to [email protected] and add the url of this post.

[eydaimon]

sent

[shypike]

I checked the NZB that you emailed.
It is a problem at the server side.
The job completes when I test it, although it takes quite long due
to the odd behaviour of Astraweb.
After a while SABnzbd says the articles are missing, but there enough par2 files for repair.

I checked the same NZB with Grabit and saw the same behaviour,
but in this case I did complete it, because Grabit had even more trouble with it.

BTW: I did see one odd thing, which is probably also an Astraweb issue.
Between the first download (with failed verification) and fetching of additional par2 files,
SABnzbd closes the connections.
Astraweb doesn't seem to like this because it subsequently says too many connections are open.
You can avoid this by setting the option "Disconnect on Empty Queue" off in Config->Servers.
SABnzbd will then keep the connections open until the servers closes them.

[eydaimon]

Interesting. The client I used was nzbvortex (http://www.nzbvortex.com/). I just tried it again, and it blasted through the NZB with no problem at all.

I wonder if that client is doing something which makes it handle it

[shypike]

I forgot to mention this.
It's also a very weird NZB.
The History entry contains this line "572 articles had non-matching duplicates".
Meaning that the NZB contains multiple articles for the same file part.
This usually happens when two people post the same stuff to a group and the
indexer (the NZB site) fails to keep them apart.

This is an undecidable issue for any program, so a arbitrary choice has to be made.
SABnzbd always picks the first candidate for each article.
If the other program always picks the last candidate, it might guess lucky.
Well, for this file at least. It may also make the wrong choice.

[shypike]

Confirmed.
I tweaked SABnzbd to pick the last candidate and now it races along.

There's no fix for this.
Like I said, the choice between article candidates is completely arbitrary.
You just had the bad luck the Astraweb has problems with the "other" set of articles.

[eydaimon]

So what happens with the "wrong" article? Astraweb doesn't send anything and there's a timeout? Could the other client be trying the other articles if one fails or do you think it's just selecting the last one? Would it be possible to make SABnzb try another article?

[shypike]

It's a rare situation, where NZB files come from low-quality indexers.
(Where does yours come from?)
We're not going to make SABnzbd needlessly complex for such rare cases.

The next part is about the original behaviour (so 1st article wins):
Despite the weirdness of the NZB, it does download properly from Astraweb,
albeit with a lot of time-outs and with more missing articles.
I've seen such NZB files before, but I don't really see them go wrong.
Also, downloading this NZB from Giganews gives no problem at all.

Conclusion: this is a combination of three issues:
- Doubtful NZB
- Doubtful behaviour (but not wrong) of Astraweb for this specific post (using first articles)
- SABnzbd's arbitrary article choice happens to be not the most favourable one for this specific NZB, when using Astraweb

I'm not considering this a problem that needs to be solved.

[eydaimon]

Alright fair enough. Just to answer your question though, either newzbin or nzbmatrix. I suspect nzbmatrix

[shypike]

Both (also) work with uploaded NZB files, so you can never be sure where they come from.
Besides, the NZB uploader may not be aware that there is a problem.

[pobox]

Please PM to me a msg-id, I can find it from that.