Groundhog Day all over again and other problems

Technical support and discussion of Newsbin Version 6 series.

Groundhog Day all over again and other problems

Postby RayMark » Mon Aug 26, 2013 6:01 pm

1. problem

It now happened to me for the second time. This time with beta 14:

Newsbin crashes (a message shows up that windows has to close it) and after restart it begins downloading again the same files that were already downloaded and not in the download list when it crashed - terabytes of them, I am not exaggerating. Some of those files were downloaded and disappeared from the download list, others were downloaded but for some reason stayed in the list and I removed them explicitly manually.
They all were gone, but now they all are again in the list, many many of them, literally terabytes. And they are being downloaded again.

Of course I have some other files in the download list that were not yet downloaded so I cannot delete them all blindly.
Anyway, were this whole history of my downloads is kept, I wonder, if those files are added to the download list again?

2. problem

Another problem that drives me crazy: when I click "pause" I expect newsbin to pause. But it does not. It continues to extract files from rars, not just the current one that was already started, but others too, those that are already downloaded and waiting to be extracted - so "pause" means nothing to NewsBin. I need the pause because I am doing some other intensive operations with the same hard drive, I don't want to see any new posts being extracted. I need newsbin to cease activities with the drive when it finishes extracting the current rar, not two hours later.

3. problem

Low disk space situation discards my manual pause.

So I click "pause" - newsbin is supposed to pause. But it continues until it runs out of disk space anyway. For example it begins to extract the next post (see problem 2). Then it runs out of space, and the red low-space bars appear.
While those bars are still on, Newsbin finishes extracting the post it begin to extract against my will (during pause) in the first place, then it deletes rars and suddenly it decides that there is enough space and starts downloading again.
So Newsbin discards my previously manually set pause. It should respect manual pauses! I click on pause and I should be able to switch to another application without the need to observe what newsbin is doing.

4. a question?
I did not investigate it, but newsbin, when it deletes rars, it uses the recycle bin - can I make it to delete those files directly? Otherwise I need to keep deleting them from the recycle bin periodically and cannot leave newsbin unattended.


5. quite often newsbin stops downloading and shows no activity even though some files are still not downloaded. After closing it and opening again, it continues downloading those files.
Because I typically have stuff in the download list, sometimes paused stuff, etc., and not everything is visible and obvious at a glance, newsbin deceives me into thinking that it finished downloading when in fact it hasn't.

6. quite often posts are not removed from the download list even after they are downloaded, extracted and rars deleted. Usually, some par2 files remain undeleted in such situations, even though repair maybe was not even needed.
After restaring newsbin, such files are downloaded again.
So I have to look for them, compare with what is downloaded and to remove manually from the download list.
Takes a lot of time to hunt for them.
Even so, it does not help with the problem 1 - see above. After a newsbin crash, even manually deleted files appear again in the download list together with those that were removed by newsbin itself - no difference.


In other words, I have no control over newsbin, it does what it wants...
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Re: Groundhog Day all over again and other problems

Postby Quade » Mon Aug 26, 2013 6:49 pm

1 - Files are cleaned from the download list when you exit Newsbin. No exit = no clean which is why you see this after a crash. I'm considering a major change to the download list. We'll have to see if that changes this.

2 - Pause only, and only ever, paused network traffic. It has nothing to do with unraring.

3 - I'd suggest you stop running out of disk space then. You can see remaining space easily enough in the status bar and you can see how much is in the download list. I'd suggest you start cleaning up when you get down to 100 gigs free space. Figure you need 2-3 times as much free space as you have files in the download list.

4 - The recycle bin is self cleaning. You can set how much disk space it's supposed to use in the recycle bin options. Look in the autopar options page for Recycle bin options.
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Re: Groundhog Day all over again and other problems

Postby RayMark » Mon Aug 26, 2013 7:16 pm

Thanks!

So if I have "Delete rars and pars on successful UnRAR"
and "Delete RARs and PARs to Recycle Bin" not checked - it will delete directly, exactly as I want.


As to pause - I really want a pause all activities button - can you add it?
I don't care so much about the network activity as about disk overload issues when other operations not related to NewsBin are being performed on the same disk, or perhaps on the same bus.

As to NewsBin switching off the pause that was set manually - it is wrong, in my opinion. Humans should have the last word :)



As to writing of download list only on exit - I have wasted already 6 hours today comparing files and deleting from that list, and there is no end in sight. Newsbin almost cannot be used until this issue is fixed.
At least there should be a button to save the current state, similar to "Save the configuration file" - maybe the same button does (or could do) that?
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Re: Groundhog Day all over again and other problems

Postby Quade » Mon Aug 26, 2013 9:57 pm

As to pause - I really want a pause all activities button - can you add it?
I don't care so much about the network activity as about disk overload issues when other operations not related to NewsBin are being performed on the same disk, or perhaps on the same bus.


Probably not. Like anything else though, I can think about it but, there are a bunch of moving parts that would have to be touched to make something like this happen.
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Re: Groundhog Day all over again and other problems

Postby RayMark » Tue Aug 27, 2013 5:50 am

Another issue - often there are posts (rars) already downloaded but unrarring is lagging far behind.
If I move such an already downloaded post up or to the top in the download list it does not cause it to be first unrarred sooner, the unrarring order is not affected at all. It seems, I might be wrong.
Sometimes the waiting for unrarring queue is quite long. Then the only solution - manual unrarring. That, of course, may cause two unrars to run simultaneously, because not even pause stops them....

It would be good to have control of the order of unrarring if a post in a long queue is urgently needed.

Anyway, I switched on the whole autopar/auto-unrar thing mainly because those operations are much faster when the post is still in the memory cache. But with a long queue this advantage is lost.
Downloading is so much faster than unrarring/repairing, that is the problem. I am getting up to 600-700 Mbps speeds. Everything is downloaded almost instantly. Perhaps this is achieved because of buffering in memory. Perhaps I should use "Pause download during UnRAR/Repair" in order to unrar always directly from the memory buffer - that is my goal.
OK, trying it.

Seems to work great - for example, a typical 1.5 GB WEB-DL takes only a few seconds to download, but also only a few seconds to unrar and a queue is (almost) not growing - sometimes a little bit of the next post is already downloaded when unrar starts. With larger posts might be a bit different picture because only a part of a large multi-part rar may remain in the memory buffer.
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