newsbin.com

Dear all,

yesterday I switched from NewsLeecher 4.0 to NewsBin 6.x (64bit) and am running against an odd problem: Populating a newly subscribed group with headers turns out to be quite difficult, specially when the group is very busy. It takes a long time until the headers are retrieved (this might be caused by GN, though), but once the process is finished, the group typically stays empty. Not every group is affected, but at least 80%. Sometimes, double-clicking the group, switching to another group, closing and reopening NB a.s.o. suddenly initiates the processing of the retrieved headers and the group is populated. Fiddling with filters, rereading the headers from the hard drive or other maneuvers like that don't help. It all started when I purchased a key and updated the trial version to the sales version. Prior to that, it worked perfect, and all groups I subscribed during the trial period still work fine.

Any ideas? - for the moment I have to switch back to NL until I can sort this out

Thanks a lot
cyana

1 - GN has exceptionally slow header downloads. Astra is at least 4 times faster. Even though GN is supposed to be delivering compressed headers, it won't even fill up my connection speed. On the other hand because of compression, I get > 100 Mbps per connection to AW. GN also has completion problems with > 1000 day old posts.

2 - The current beta - B12 prioritizes header import for the group you're currently looking at so, you should see headers faster than you would with older versions.

If you look down at the "Cache" line, a number in parens represents how many blocks of headers are still being imported. It's these blocks of importing headers that are re-prioritized with B12.

Thanks Quade for your swift reply !
Some problems might be caused by GN, however I have no problems to receive the headers with NL when subscribing to a new group.

One general question - is it possible to switch the language within the installed NewsBin version? I'm using the German localization, so I unfortunately have no idea what the "Cache" line could be? Also, since German text tends to be longer than English, a lot of labels in NewsBin's GUI are truncated (specially options) and are not understandable anymore, and you can't resize the option windows to make them readable.

However - problem I encounter is that NewsBin completes or seems to complete the d/l of the headers (at least according to the counters), but does not process them so the group still stays empty. When I look into the SPOOL_V6 folder of the affected group, I find tons of RV4 files (>10,000) with a typical size of around 2MB, while in groups that are ok, no RV4 files show up, instead they have big Storage.db3 and StorageData.db3 files, while the size in affected groups is 80KB/32KB. So it seems that NewsBin cannot/does not generate proper db3 files for whatever reason.

Is it maybe possible to import headers from NL ?

thanks a lot
cyana

That tells me you're running 6.42 or older and that you have many files waiting to import. The cache line is on the status bar down at the bottom of the main windows.

That whole mechanism changed for the 6.50 beta's.

You can simply install again to change the language. It won't mess anything up.

I think 6.50 B12 is significantly better than 6.42 but, the translations don't exist yet.

Thanks Quade. Meanwhile, I cannot import/setup any new group, even when it has just a few headers. I will give 6.50 beta a try.

You may want to delete all the RV4 files because they're ahead (in processing order) of the new headers you're downloading. That's why I change the way these are prioritized in the beta so, the current visible tab always gets it's headers imported first.

First time you download a massive number of headers, it takes awhile to put them away. Later, when you're just doing daily updates, it's much quicker because there aren't gigs of headers to process.

6.50 beta definitely cures the problem. Thanks for your help Quade!

Wow, thanks for the confirmation.