Getting the most out of your bandiwidth.

[dexter]

LAST EDITED ON 03-12-02 AT 12:18 PM (EST) NewsBin allows you to maintain multiple simultaneous connections to your news server or servers. Using the maximum of 8 connections does not necessarily mean you'll get the best datarate. There is a point of diminishing returns due to protocol overhead. With asymmetric internet connections such as Satellite, ADSL, and most cable systems, you may saturate your uplink (usually much lower datarate than your downlink) with network traffic - acknowledgments of packets. The answer is to experiment. Use one reliable server, queue up a significant number of downloads from the same group, and watch the datarate guage. Start with one connection and work your way up, 30-60 seconds at a time, watching the datarate. You most likely will see either a bell curve or a steady climb in datarate but leveling off. In our testing against a news server running on the same machine as NewsBin, we've attained datarates of 80Mbps with only 4 connections. The bottleneck for achieving high datarates will either be the quality of your internet connection, the quality of the news server, or, if you are on a 10Mbps or better internet connection, hard drive performance. Some news servers are limiting their per/connection datarates so no matter how fast your internet connection is, the best you can do can be calculated by multiplying the number of threads by the bandwidth limit.

Fine Tuning:

1) See comments under "TCP Window Size".

2) Use multiple servers: Most users find that their ISP news server is fast, but usually not the most complete. You can augment the quality of your primary news server by signing up for another news provider. By prioritizing your servers in the server window (click and drag), you can tell NewsBin to download from your primary server whenever it can and go to secondary servers as needed. This makes the most of your bandwidth because your primary server is usually the fastest.

3) Tell NewsBin about server limits: Most news servers limit the number of active connections you can have. You can tell NewsBin about these limits under the "Servers" menu. If you have hit your limit, you will see error messages in the "Status Messages" tab.

4) Use good, quality servers. Our favorites right now (changes frequently) are Easynews and Usenetserver.