newsbin.com

Good Day,

I am getting absoulutely smashed by bandwidth usage in simply trying to download headers.

I have gone to the group properties and limited the "Use Header Download Age" option.

My understanding is the header is the reference without image or attachment download. Should headers be using up bandthwith like this?

I'm certain I am missing a setting to limit what is downloaded but I am lost in trying to find it. Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Most people don't realize that headers are decently big. Probably 400-600 bytes each. If you download 100 million headers that's about 50 gigs of data. It's one reason people like to use our search engine. Because you don't have to download any headers. What news server are you using? Astraweb and Giga both support header compression so the actual "over the wire" amount of data is about 1/10 what it seems to be.

In the main options, set the "Download Age" to however many days you want to download. This will only apply to new groups. If you want to force old groups to also be limited to that, you need to select them, right click and "Post Storage/Use Download Age".

Some groups get 4-6 million headers a day. That means to keep that one group current you have to download 200 megs a day worst case. I download headers for some groups. For really high traffic groups. I don't.

Thanks Quade,

Yes, using both Astraweb and Giga News as providers.

As stated, did a fresh install and this includes data. I'll likely then look to drop the groups to as low as 2 days worth of feed.

My ISP caps me at 300 so watching the usage timer spool is a bit frightening. I can verify the compression as I also have a usage monitor app running on my PC so I don't have a full coronary attack.

Appreciate your time to reply.