newsbin.com

Hi guys,

I've noticed an issue that seems to be frequently happening in 6.50RC2, but it also happened in RC1. What I'm doing is searching for things with the inbuilt search engine. I then right click the items I want and click "Download to folder named for Subject" to add them to the queue. What I'm noticing is that some of these items are not being added to the download list, but the status in the search results updates and retains the "Queued for Download" status. It usually occurs when I add a few items (of reasonable size, maybe 300-500mb each queue) at a time and in fairly quick succession, and Newsbin is crunching on adding all of my selections to the list. They never show up in the download list no matter how long I wait, but if I go back and do the exact same thing that are all ready supposedly queued, they'll get added to the list. It just seems to randomly skip queued items and doesn't persist once the download list queue is populated to completion. It doesn't happen all the time, but enough that I'm noticing it quite a bit. I don't recall having these issues in pre-6.5 versions.

I can't seem to reproduce it if I queue up items more slowly and wait for them to be added to the DL list. Also, if I re-perform the search, the results don't show the queued status anymore, which I'd expect because they weren't actually queued. I'm happy to provide further details in private, if needed, but I understand the guidelines of this forum. I haven't seen anyone else report this since RC1 came out, so I guess it has to be me! Thanks for all your hard work!

Give RC3 a try and see if the issue is still there. Quade fixed an issue with local search that may be related. It's on the beta page.

Thanks for the quick response, Dexter.

No dice on RC3. Loaded it up this morning and within 4-5 queues, I could tell there was no difference in RC3. It's sill skipping some (seemingly random) queue additions that I'm trying to send to the download folder. I don't think it's an issue with local vs. internet search, by the way...it'll happen straight with the results from internet search. I haven't tried this to see if it's a problem from groups as I largely don't use that feature as much these days.

Just for clarity sake, it's not missing individual files within a queue. It skips the entire queued download that was selected to be added.

If I can provide any further information or assistance with trying to identify what's going on, let me know. Thanks for all your guys do!

Hit the main pause button, lets things stop downloading, then try queuing the files with Newsbin paused. I suspect the connection to the search server is simply silently failing.

Quade,

I think you're on to something. I did as you asked, and sure enough, it doesn't seem to happen. I queued up over 10 things with Newsbin paused and it didn't skip any queued downloads. Hoorah! Easy enough workaround for now. Appreciate it!

Could this be something on my end, possibly? I do have intermittent failures of my internet connection. I haven't correlated whether this is the case or not, but just off the cuff, I don't "think" so. Reason I say is this happens frequently enough, whereas my internet failures are a lot less frequent. Just thought I'd mention it in case it's relevant.

Well, it's not a commonly reported issue so, intermittent connectivity might be to blame. How many connections to the news server are you using? Many people simply use too many connections so, there's no room for additional data transfers. I use 10 connection each to 2 servers and even that's more than I need to get 100 Mbps downloads.

Quade,

I finally got a chance to do some more thorough testing on this. I can tell you definitively it has nothing to do with the number of connections. I use 10 normally and my provider allows 20, but just to check I tried lesser numbers and could still reproduce the problem.

I'm virtually certain the problem occurs when my ISP drops, which tends to happen more frequently when I'm saturating my connection with NB. (This is a fairly new problem for me, happened to coincide with my move to the RC's.) I ran side-by-side ping tests while queuing and sure enough, when my WAN dropped, the search would skip over any queued additions. So obviously the queue needs to talk to the server when actually adding it to the list, else it will fail.

Not a big deal, don't need you to do anything about it unless you want to. Now that I know what the problem is, I can avoid it simply enough. Just wanted to let you know I was able to correlate the two issues and it has nothing to do with NB. Thanks again for your help!