Newsbin uses 100% processor time

[Jerry2KC]

Although at first I thought it happened as a result of downloading too many headers in a single group, it looks more likely now that it began with the upgrade installation of 6.5.2. As Newsbin was used it became progressively more sluggish, until it became difficult to use at all. Almost as if there was a huge memory leak that eventually consumed all system resources. As this problem worsened Newsbin was re-installed twice using the upgrade build, and each time it seemed to help but only for a short time. Before long the sluggish performance returned. Also beginning with version 6.5.2 Newsbin started generating an error message every time it was shut down. The pop up displays: "The exception unknown software exception (0x000001e) occurred in the application at location 0x02ef1490. Click on OK to terminate the program." (This did not change when version 6.5.3 was installed.)

At last I decided to do a full re-installation, so I downloaded nb653-full.exe, and installed it on a different drive than the previous version had been on. News servers were configured, the newsgroup list was downloaded, and several news groups were selected to be displayed in the group list. A group was selected that contained roughly 400K messages according to the information shown on the group selection window. No changes were made to default settings for header downloads, and "download latest" was selected. (By the time I wanted to know it was unclear how many headers had actually been downloaded as the header list by then was unresponsive to attempts to scroll it, and the portion that would show the count is obscured.)


The computer performance was noticeably slowed after the headers were downloaded, but the system remained usable.
Approximately 40 files were selected for download, the first of which was about 3 GBytes in size. As the first download
neared the halfway mark a low disk space popup window was displayed saying that the drive with the download directory was within 174 MBtes of being full. This was <My Computer\newsbin> because I had forgotten to change it. I had remembered to change the data directory, however, to a drive with over 100GB of free space.

The popup window was dismissed by clicking "OK", and changing the download directory was attempted, but not successful
because the popup was modally re-displayed too quickly. The entire system was now operating very sluggishly, and in spite of repeated attempts the download directory could not be changed. Pausing the download was also repeatedly attempted, but neither the pause button at the top of the screen or the button just above the download list had any effect, regardless of whether the current download, all downloads or no downloads were selected. The pause button icon appeared to respond, but slowly, and whether the mouse click was fully detected by the system is unknown. Actually, I can't say with certainty whether any of the files in the download list were actually selected, because the screen was not updating properly, and the files never appeared to be highlighted, even after selecting them with <ctrl>a.

To prevent the C: drive from getting completely filled up, the network connection was disabled, also in hopes that the
download could then be paused. The system remained loaded at 100% processor usage and the pause button still had no apparent effect, so at last Newsbin was stopped using task manager. The rest of the system immediately went back to normal when this was done.

All of the files that had been inadvertently written to the C: drive were moved to an external usb drive (Toshiba Cancio 3000 GBytes with about 800 GBytes free space available, and Newsbin was re-started. Changing the download directory was immediately attempted, and although the download restarted itself immediately, this time the directory was successfully changed to the USB drive. Automatic par functions and spam filtering were both turned off as well. Nevertheless, in just seconds Newsbin was again consuming 100% of the processor time and the system regained the sluggish condition it had been in before being stopped the last time. Again, pausing the download was attempted but without success. At this point I ran out of ideas.

A minor note: It was noticed that Newsbin reports duplicate file rejects as par errors, even when autopar is turned off. the complete error message includes the information that it was a duplicate file, but only "par error" is visible on my screen (1280 x 1024) unless I manually expand the column width on the download list. I believe the post list shows the same or similar.

System configuration:
Windows XP professional version 2002 SP3 + all subsequent updates. Processor is AMD Athlon 1.25GHz with 2 GBytes RAM. Antivirus software is Bitdefender Free Edition V 1.0.21.1099. (Newsbin was tested with Bitdefender enabled and disabled, but there was no detectable difference.) The video card is AMD Radeon HD 3650 AGP, driver Version 8.970.100.0.

Any suggestions for a fix would be much appreciated!

[Quade]

Although at first I thought it happened as a result of downloading too many headers in a single group, it looks more likely now that it began with the upgrade installation of 6.5.2

If you look down at the status bar near "cache" do you see a number in parens (XXX)? I'm just wondering if Newsbin is importing downloaded headers. Having the data folder on a slowish USB drive probably won't help. If it's importing headers, you might just want to let it run till the number goes to zero.

At this point I'm not clear if there's an issue or if this can be considered normal for a modestly powered PC. I test Newsbin on a dual core 1Ghz intel laptop with 4 gigs of RAM. It struggles some doing things like header imports on larger groups. It's got an SSD drive too which helps. Larger groups can totally overwhelm low powered PC's.