anyone else having par/rar issues with the last few betas?

[wordy]

Howdy,

I don't know exactly when it started, but the last few betas have really had issues with not being able to process incomplete posts. I've gone from very bandwidth conservative settings all the way to aggressive and it's only slightly better. I've been looking for patterns, but it's not completely clear what's going on so I'll just describe what I'm seeing.

Running 6.50B12, Win7 32-bit

Newsbin deletes post collections that it can't process from the queue instead of moving them to the Failed Files tab. To a long time user, this makes it very hard get any information about what went wrong. To a new user, this gives the impression that everything went fine when it didn't. I'd suggest either leaving them in the main queue paused or moving them to Failed Files. By deleting them completely, we have to go find the collection and add it to the queue again to get any clue of what happen (missing file parts, missing blocks, user error, poster error, etc).

It's somewhat inconsistent, but Newsbin is not doing an Assemble Incompletes on some files. I think it most often happens on rar/r01/r02/r03/etc collections (couple today), but it may happen on others. In combination with the above problem, I'll come back and find a directory with several files missing (e.g. r03 & r07). I know Newsbin has downloaded most of these files because when I re-add the collection to the queue, those files show as mostly downloaded with a couple missing blocks. This makes the par/autorar fail more often then it should because entire files are missing instead of just a couple blocks.

When in Pause PARS mode, Newsbin sometimes doesn't download any of the PAR2 repair files to attempt to fix a collection and just removes it from the queue unprocessed. I think this most often happens if the primary .PAR2 check file can't be downloaded but I could swear I've seen it on some where that file was ok. Combined with the first issue, this often requires me to manually find the other par2 files, re-add them to the download queue and repair things manually (not hard for experienced users, but new users will be confused).

Many times (twice today so far) Newsbin can't seem to repair files even though there are tons of extra PAR2 blocks available. I come back to a popup warning that not enough blocks were available and it deletes the collection from the queue anyhow. I can run QuickPar and there will be far and beyond the necessary blocks to repair. Maybe it's related to the first issue where Newsbin removes things from the queue aggressively, not giving the repair engine the time it needs?

Aggressive mode seems to download all the pars before even trying to repair the file (Pause PARS is off and Aggressive mode on). I just watched it download 100+ PAR2 blocks when the PAR: ## of ## showed 1 missing block. It didn't start processing anything until all 100+ PAR2 blocks were downloaded. If it has what it needs, shouldn't Newsbin at least start the repair instead of waiting until another 200mb of pars have downloaded?

Thanks for your time and hope this gives you enough information. Let me know if you need anything else.

[DThor]

I'm not seeing the missing fail tab entries - everything that I test that fails - spam settings, dupe check - goes there. The rest remain behind in the queue waiting for you to do something. You know, I'm the one to blame for Aggressive Mode, I whined for it since I didn't care whether or not I downloaded a few extra chunks, I just wanted speed, but I've stopped using it. I wonder if that's related? Try turning it off and see if that makes a difference.

DT

[Quade]

What kind of CPU do you have? I've seen a couple reports that seem related to AMD CPU's.

[wordy]

What kind of CPU do you have? I've seen a couple reports that seem related to AMD CPU's.

It's a somewhat older Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700. I have it overclocked, but it's been this way for years. The machine gets a lot of varied use (coding/large compiles, video recoding, moderately stressful games, etc) so I'd really expect to see other issues if it were the hardware.

Not sure if it matters, but I do run Newsbin with "Reduce the amount of CPU that PAR repair and UnRAR can use" and "Limit repair so, it leaves one CPU available" checked. Not because I really need to on this machine, but because I'd prefer these tasks to run more in the background if I'm doing something else. Couldn't find a more typical Below Normal/Idle priority setting.

Based on DThor's comment I'll turn Aggressive mode off for awhile (and leave Pause PARS off also).

[Quade]

Yeah, Aggressive mode is problematic.