SABnzbd Forums

I cant find this in the manual, the wiki or in a search in the forum. Three questions:

1. CONNECTIONS: Is there a maximum number of connections? How does this exactly work? If I put in 20 vs 10 will I get faster speeds? How does one know what the restriction is or what the optimum number is?

2. SERVERS: Is having more servers in the list better? Does it increase downloads because you can get more threads/slots going? What is the optimum? More better?

3. DOWNLOADS:
a) When it lists 9 things in the queue on the queue page, is it downloading them in order or simultaneously? 
b) I am downloading something - after a few minutes I check and it is sitting idle. If I change the next download to "0" status it moves up on the list and the download starts going clocking away at 300kps. Now if I go and change the one that had stalled to the "0" slot, it will download some more and then go idle again. Why does this happen?

Thanks much from a noob.

1. Depends completely on your news provider.
With Giganews it helps to use the maximum amount that Giganews allows.
Some providers give full speed on just two connections.

2. Depends on the news servers and your total ISP bandwidth.
Extra servers are usually backups for missing articles.
When your have an expensive server (like Giganews) you need no others.

3. a) In the order shown. There's an extra option that allows some downloading for the next
jobs to occur when for some reason there's a delay in the first job (usually a server issue).
b) could be the the server doesn't have the articles, some servers are very slow in
telling you that an article is missing.

1. How do you find out what the max number is. I'm currently using free servers as I'm learning everything.

3. What is the setting to change the option to start the next when idle?

Thanks

1. check the servers docs or try until you get an error message.

2. We wrote the Wiki for a reason, look at http://sabnzbd.wikidot.com/configure-switches

b) could be the the server doesn't have the articles, some servers are very slow in
telling you that an article is missing.

I'm currently using free servers

There's definitely a relation between these issues.
Free servers are almost always low quality. Lots of missing articles, low retention times.