newsbin.com

HI,

I've upgraded from 6.55 to 6.60 beta 2 yesterday, and i see the my servers connections are shown as a servers. which means, that if i'm configuring 2 news servers that i'm working with, one with 30 connections, and one with 60, i see that the servers tab shows me a total of 92 servers (the 2 servers, and the total amount of connections).

I've searched the forum for the same issue, but couldn't find anything regarding this issue.

is it a bug? or a new design? and if so, is it possible to bring it back to the old view?

thanks.

I see 2 servers and a bunch of connections. Connections are indented, have a different icon and say "Disconnected" or "Connected".

Just a side comment, 90 connections is typically a pointless exercise. Usenet isn't like torrents. Torrents need lots of connections. Usenet typically doesn't. I'll bet it's no faster than 20 connections but, causes a bunch more CPU thrashing and might actually even be slower than 20. Use the fewest connections that give you top speed. The more connections you run, the more likely you are to have problems. Most of the time you can improve download speed by increasing the cache size but, that only seems to benefit > 200 Mbps connections.

Quade wrote:I see 2 servers and a bunch of connections. Connections are indented, have a different icon and say "Disconnected" or "Connected".

Just a side comment, 90 connections is typically a pointless exercise. Usenet isn't like torrents. Torrents need lots of connections. Usenet typically doesn't. I'll bet it's no faster than 20 connections but, causes a bunch more CPU thrashing and might actually even be slower than 20. Use the fewest connections that give you top speed. The more connections you run, the more likely you are to have problems. Most of the time you can improve download speed by increasing the cache size but, that only seems to benefit > 200 Mbps connections.

correct.

there are 2 servers and 90 connections, that say "Disconnected" or "Connected". but if you look at the tab, you'll see "servers:(92)". it doesn't really matter, or bothering, it just that its nicer to actually see the sum of your servers.

regarding the amount of connections, it's nice to know. I've been using Usenet for years, and i remember that in the past, more connections were actually improved the download speed. i'll try your recommendation to use less connections, and see how it goes.

but if i understand you correctly, the new display is by design, and cannot be changed to the "older" view?


thanks for your quick reply and help!

there are 2 servers and 90 connections, that say "Disconnected" or "Connected". but if you look at the tab, you'll see "servers:(92)". it doesn't really matter, or bothering, it just that its nicer to actually see the sum of your server

If you'd said this in the first post, my answer would have been different. I agree, it should only list 2 probably.

regarding the amount of connections, it's nice to know. I've been using Usenet for years, and i remember that in the past, more connections were actually improved the download speed. i'll try your recommendation to use less connections, and see how it goes.

You hit a point of diminishing returns with connections.

Giganews started the connection wars some years ago. They implied 50 was better than say 8 that another provider might support. It was mostly marketing. People seem to assum "connections = speed" which typically isn't true. Faster up to a point, then it gets no faster.

If you'd said this in the first post, my answer would have been different. I agree, it should only list 2 probably.

I've probably wasn't clear enough in my first post . anyway, i hope it will be fixed

You hit a point of diminishing returns with connections.

Giganews started the connection wars some years ago. They implied 50 was better than say 8 that another provider might support. It was mostly marketing. People seem to assum "connections = speed" which typically isn't true. Faster up to a point, then it gets no faster.

You're probably right in this case too .

Thanks for your help!

Yeah another vote here for saying the new way of displaying the servers is not so great, in fact it's a pain in the butt scrolling through them all to get to the next one. Not really sure why this was changed as I don't see any improvements over the old system?

Any chance of this being addressed please? Really isn't a user friendly change IMO.

I'm thinking about changes to it. You know, anything you want to do in the servers tab you can do in the servers options right?

What I liked to see/use the server tab for is to see which servers are getting the files I want and which are showing it as not being available, previous versions of Newsbin I simply clicked on the server and it showed the active threads in a separate box on the right, I have to scroll through 20 connections on my first server to get down to view my second server.

Perhaps I'm being dense but I can't really see the reason or logic for changing it in all honesty, is there a new improvement I'm missing in the way you've changed the layout and functionality of the server tab?

I think you mis-remember how the old one worked. The right hand list showed all the connections all the time (I just checked 6.55). Not just one server's worth. In 6.60, there is one additional line per server. If you have 10 servers there are 10 additional lines in the list which doesn't seem to change how much you scrolled.

I could probably improve it by moving disabled servers to the bottom of the list and allowing the connections to be compacted. If you then only had one active server all if the connections would be grouped at the top.

As to why I made the change. To me the old way was fairly ugly and not very space efficient. This way you can see what servers are working and make modification on the fly.

Yes but it was separate from the list of servers which was a nice simple functionality, in my mind anyway!

I moved the disabled servers to the bottom. I have 4 active servers. Between 6.55 and 6.60 I had to scroll an additional 4 lines.

How many servers do you use? I'm probably going to add the ability to compact the connections too.

2 one with 20 connections, one with 50 connections.

You know you'd probably get better results with fewer connections. 50 connections buys you nothing except more ram use and more CPU load. I'll bet if you did 20/20 you'd not notice any difference in performance. Things like sampling would actually work faster.

Quade wrote:You know you'd probably get better results with fewer connections. 50 connections buys you nothing except more ram use and more CPU load. I'll bet if you did 20/20 you'd not notice any difference in performance. Things like sampling would actually work faster.

Well I have 500Mbit so need all the connections I can get Haven't actually done any speed tests TBH, it almost always does the downloading when I'm in bed asleep so the RAM/CPU load doesn't bother me too much