With the big gap in available retention, the current fillserver-system can be a bit troublesome. I normally use one of the cheap 100d services for most of my downloads, but every now and then I need something older. I have access to an account that offers 200d retention, but i only want to use that for stuff that really is older than my main servers.
If I set it as fillserver, SAB tries to get every article from the first server which seems to take forever on large posts. It would be awesome if there was a setting to force SAB to automatically try the fillservers if the article is older than the retention set in the server with priority 0. (I could think of even better strategies for my situation, but this sounds like something that can be implemented pretty easy)
What do you think?
RE: suggestion: max retention server setting
Delete By: shypike (shypikeProject Admin) - 2007-12-01 13:53
Quite a good suggestion, thank you.
I'll put this on the todo list for a later release.
Of course this is not exact science, in the sense that claimed retention rates tend to differ quite a bit over the groups carried by one ISP. At least this is my experience.
RE: suggestion: max retention server setting
Delete By: salami (salami) - 2007-12-01 14:32
Indeed, some servers do have different retention in their groups. The situation has become much better now though, since most of the cheap providers are now using Highwinds' backends (guess why they all suddenly offer the 100d retention
), which seem to have the same ~100d retention in all the groups. If the main server doesn't have the article even though it's within it's set retention range, the regular fillserver-system can still kick in and get the article from a lower priority server. An alternative solution might be an internal counter that watches the missing articles on the main servers, if 99% among the first ~500 articles from a NZB are missing, it is very likely that they don't carry any of them and SAB can fall back to the fillservers entirely. That sounds like much more work though
