Yet another Speed Limiter thread (sorry)

[Pork]

I just searched and read through a bunch of other speed limiter postings and didn't see this same issue, but apologies if it's a repeat...

I have a 30 Mbps connection. However it's cable, so on nights like tonight (Saturday night) with cable being shared among the neighborhood I get more like 20Mbps.

I Just upgraded from 6.40 to 6.41...

With 6.40, the speed limiter was working for me, albeit with something wrong in the math because I always had to set the speed about 50% higher than what I wanted to get desired results. But if I ignored the value in the options dialog and just played with the slider until the "actual" value in the main window status bar ended up where I wanted, I could work with that.

Now with 6.41, if I use the speed limiter at all, the actual speed will go to zero and stay there for a few minutes, then for a few seconds blip up to maybe 5 or 7 Mbps, then back down to zero and stay there for a few minutes.. repeat cycle. Not much progress this way, clearly.

If I turn speed limiter off, my downloads pick up and the actual speed in the status bar maxes out to about 20 Mbps and stays steady. But then of course my wife (who plays Aion) starts grumbling because I'm giving her lag. Thus the need for speed limiter!

I have two servers defined, both with 20 connections. So I went and changed the # of connections to 8 each, then restarted newsbin (suggestion.. can Newsbin put the change to the # of servers into effect without requiring restart?). Anyway, after restarting, then re-enabling speed limiter (since it turns itself off after restart), now I can again get a fairly steady download going, although again, the number in the options dialog doesn't match actual.

For example, right now the dialog setpoint is 20 Mbps, and for actual I'm getting between 11 and 13 Mbps. I know it's not a bandwidth bottleneck, because if I turn off speed limiter, the actual value shoots up to 20 Mbps.

With v 6.40, having the 20 connections on the two target usenet servers didn't seem to affect speed control. Now with 6.41 it seems less tolerant of that number. I'm guessing the speed limiter routine is more compute-intensive now, which slows it's reaction time a bit, and it just can't recalculate all 20 connections as quickly as it used to, and gets behind, and starts to go into slow oscillation. Using a smaller number of connections gives the limiter less "work" to do, and lets it react quickly enough to maintain stead state.

So, is that what's going on? Or am I out in left field..

Also I'm curious why (when limiter is working), the actual speed never seems to match the value set in the dialog, not even close. Is that a common issue, or maybe something about my setup?

Thanks,