newsbin.com

Hello,

I have been using below setup for years but lately I see some strange behaviour.
I have 4 news providers
astra no SSL 50 connections
sunny no SSL 50 connections
eweka no SSL 20 connections
local kpn(with SSL) 10 connections (maxes out at 30Mbit I think).
and 2 internet providers (cable 600/40 and fiber 100/100)
I send 1 news provider to the fiber ( kpn) and 3 providers (eweka, astra, sunny) to the cable connection using static routes on my router.

Now when I enable all 4 providers in newsbin the speed maxes out at 50MByte/sec
When I disable the SSL provider (kpn) the speed increases to 78MByte/sec.

I used to have all 4 enabled and reach 85 MByte/sec. But at that time the kpn server did not require SSL.

Now I was playing arround with enabling/disabling news servers several times in Newsbin while downloading and had newsbin just crash.

Anyway the question is : Why does this happen? Is this a side effect of using some newsservers with SSL and some newsservers without SSL ? Is it something that can be fixed in Newsbin? Or does using SSL use too much resources on my download PC (i7-9700 / 32GB ram, NVME 1TB download SSD)? taskmanager says 40% cpu load.

First off, I think you're using too many connections. I get better speeds than that with 14 total connections to a single server. Usenet doesn't benefit from a bunch of connections like Torrents do. You want the fewest connections that give you the peak speed. Adding more connections can just slow things down.

I don't believe your issue has anything to do with SSL.

Are all the servers the same priority?

The way usenet works is Newsbin sends a command for data and the server replies with the data so, the time between the command and the response is a delay. Not all servers will respond as quickly as others. If a server is slow to respond, it'll gate the faster server's downloads. It sounds to me like KPN might be slow and i'st gating the download speed from the faster servers. I imagine using too many connections will increase the delay too.

Thanks for your reply.
Yes they all have priority 1

In the past (long ago) the usenet providers would cap each connection. And by setting more connections you would get better speed. Probably having over 100 connections is overkill and could be counter productive.
Indeed the kpn news provider is something I get for free with the ISP subscription and it is not very good. Only 3-4 weeks retention. But in regards to DMCA it used to be quite good.
Could very well be that it caps the other providers by being very slow and throwing error.

I noticed that the kpn provider also throws errors (each line several times).
[06/29 18:49:57] ERROR BR: Read Failure: 16384 to read 0 Actual Read Code: 18446744071562084356
[06/29 18:49:57] ERROR BR: Read Failure - Would Block
[06/29 18:49:57] ERROR Downloader: Socket Exception NEWS SERVER ERROR: kpn NNTPServer: Zero bytes read from connection kpn
[06/29 18:49:57] ERROR Downloader: Socket Exception GetDomain:kpn Socket error: kpn
[06/29 18:49:57] ERROR Downloader: Unknown Download Exception kpn

I'll keep it disabled unless all others have DMCA'd something I want to get.

And enabling it, just now, made newsbin hang (I had to kill it with task manager).