newsbin.com

For the past couple of days i have noticed the following behavior which i conclude it is not coincidental: every time i download the latest headers in a group, the multi-part post that was incomplete the last time i downloaded headers, remains incomplete. I don't know if it's a bug or something that can be resolved by changing a setting but it seems strange.

Example:

Let's say a user starts posting a multi-part message named Test1, which consists of 6 RARs:

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Test1 file
--test01.rar (10 subparts)
--test02.rar (10 subparts)
--test03.rar (10 subparts)
--test04.rar (10 subparts)
--test05.rar (10 subparts)
--test06.rar (10 subparts)

At a certain point, the button to download headers from the server is pressed. Let's say that after the download of the headers, the group shows as last post the Test1 multipart, as follows:

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Test1 file
--test01.rar (10 subparts)
--test02.rar (10 subparts)
--test03.rar (7 subparts downloaded in the server so far so this file is marked with a yellow exclamation point as incomplete)

Now, if i download headers after let's say an hour, i get this result:

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Test1 file
--test01.rar (10 subparts)
--test02.rar (10 subparts)
--test03.rar (still 7 subparts downloaded in the server, so this file is still marked as incomplete)
--test04.rar (10 subparts)
--test05.rar (10 subparts)
--test06.rar (10 subparts)

This seems to happen every time i download headers. Thank God for PARs but still, it seems like a bug...

Set an overlap of 100 in your server options and see what happens.

Some servers are server farms. The server farms aren't always 100% synced so, subsequent header downloads might not match up because you hit a different internal server each time. All it takes is being off one record number to end up with an incomplete file. Overlap forces some overlap with each header download.

So, yeah it's a problem, I just don't think it's a problem in Newsbin. Giganews doesn't need an overlap for example.

I'll try it and post the results here later, thanks.

FYI, problem has been solved using the Overlap field, thanks.

You might try shrinking it down to 100 and see what happens. I think the incompletes probably represent a fairly low number of posts. It would help your issue with "new records" too.

Quade wrote:You might try shrinking it down to 100 and see what happens. I think the incompletes probably represent a fairly low number of posts. It would help your issue with "new records" too.

Well, 5000 is certainly too much but i tried 100 in the beginning and there were still some incompletes. I was not sure if they were due to real reasons or due to "server farming", so i left it at 5000 to be sure. I'll try reducing it to see what happens.

Thanks.

I'd step it up to 500 then and see what happens.

Overlap is one of those things that hit a point of diminishing returns pretty quick and then causes problems. Overlap can cause problems with "old/new" and new records (as you pointed out). Ideally you wouldn't have to run an overlap but, some servers require it.

Quade wrote:Ideally you wouldn't have to run an overlap but, some servers require it.

Yup, like mine.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try it.