Giganews slow on 50MB

[Guitarfreak]

Hi guys,

Im registered to giganews diamond package and ive been using SABnzbd to download my newsgroup stuff.. Before last night i got speeds around 2900kb but now its stuck on 1000kb and keeps going up and down...

Is there anything else i can do to get this better.. I dont even know if 2900kb is a good speed considering im on 50MB BB with Virgin?

Cheers in advance guys

EDIT - Im on Mac too

[Simzter]

I have 20MB vm broadband, however I only get download speeds of 1.6MB/S

I think the transfer rate is a percentage of what your actual broadband speed is.

I use Newsnet - and in the download speed it displays my download speed in two sections, it shows 13/14 MB/S and then after it 1.6mb/s

Speedtest.net shows my speed is around 14mb/s so it's acurate.

[JasonH]

Hello Gents,

Believe it or not, I registered on this forum just to answer your questions ;-)
(I'm a Computer Scientist who works in the Internet space and uses Giganews, so I couldn't resist!)

I think you guys are mixing your bits and bytes. In the binary world, 1 Byte = 8 bits and Kilo means 1024 (not 1000). Uppercase B implies Bytes and lowercase bits.

Guitarfreak, your broadband connection is actually 50Mb/s, which equals: 6.25 MB/s, 6400KB/s, or 51200Kb/s
Last night you were getting 2900KBytes/s which is 23200Kbits/s or 2.83 MB/s or 22.66 Mb/s which is roughly half of your 'advertised' bandwidth.

It is not uncommon for BB providers to oversubcribe, causing bottlenecks upstream, so 22.66Mb/s out of 50Mb/s isn't bad! Also, it is possible your Mac isn't powerful enough to process more than 22.66Mb/s worth of Usenet binaries at once. More often than not with 50Mb/s connections the computer becomes the bottleneck.

As for the sudden drop, there were outages on certain parts of the European internet backbone at around 23:00 GMT yesterday and traffic is probably being rerouted on a slower path. It will resolve itself soon, if it hasn't already.

Once you are back to 2900 KB/s, see if you can make it faster by increase or decrease the number of concurrent connections under Config->Servers. But don't follow the software maker's advice - They state "Enter the maximum number of connections your news host allows". This is not a good idea. Although Giganews Diamond allows up to 50, but more isn't better, as it's very resource itensive to have that many connections at once on one machine. My advice: if it's currently set to more than 15 connections try lowering it. If it's low (5 or fewer) try increasing it. I use 20 and it saturates my 50Mb/s connection here in the USA.

Warm Regards,

Jason

[Guitarfreak]

Hi Jason

Its a macbook pro so should be powerful enough i hope lol.

I had 50 connections so now put it to 20..

Ill re try some stuff and see how it goes