Slow Download speeds

[mike929]

had to change to a 10/10 split because i was getting too many connections with 15/15.

[greatwhitebuffalo]

Hey Jumpup, thanks for the post! I signed up for an account just to thank you for finally giving me a solution to slowing download speeds. I was thinking it was Comcast throttling but once I added the second server the connection was saturated as it should be!

Cheers!

[mike929]

Thanks for the reply. My speed is great during the day but in the evening when everyone is home my connection speed is horrible. I take it this is due to us sharing the connection. I don't like it..not sure what can be done about that.

[mbabauer]

This is an old thread, so sorry for resurrecting it. And sorry for the long post.

I have been a LONG time user of SAB. I was running everything on a 4-core AMD Phenom w/ 16gb ram total running Ubuntu 12.04. On it I had SABNZBD, SickBeard, CouchPotato, and Headphones (among some other apps) with all the DASD being local SATA drives (2, to be exact: 2TB Hitachi and a 4TB Samsung). Unfortunately that box died a horrible and miserable death, so now I had to re-think my setup.

As a replacement, I am using an old PowerMac G4 w/ 2gb ram running Gentoo Linux, with the DASD being a QNAP TS0419P II connected over NFS. I have SAB setup to use the local HDD on the laptop as it's "incoming" folder, and the /Downloads share on the QNAP as the "completed". For USENET servers I use both TweakNews.eu (30 connections available) and Astra (20 connection available). I have business-class Verizon FIOS, reported at 120/120, but SpeedTest.net usually has me at ~80MB/s up and down.

Let me start by saying in all the years I have ran SAB, I have NEVER seen higher than 9-10MB/s reported by the app. Under my new setup, I am getting about 4-5.5MB/s for one download, less if I have more than one at a time, so about half what I was seeing before. I thought it was time to do something about this.

Per the recommendations of the prior post, I have decreased the number of connections for 30/20 to 10/10, split evenly between Tweak and Astra. Both are setup to use SSL, in case that matters. Having only 2gb of RAM, I set the article cache to 128M. CPU for SAB is usually about 90-99% while downloading. Once the par2 kicks in, that process takes about 90-99% CPU. This is when I have only one download going at a time.

When I have more than one download with repairs/unpacking all going on at once, the speed drops to about 3-3.5MB/s, with SAB taking about 58-60% CPU and the repair/unpack tacking about 30-30% CPU. It seems to me like I am getting CPU-bound here, but would like to get the opinion of some experts to see what they think. Also, is there anything else I can do to maybe speed things up a bit?

I am stuck with this setup for a while. When my original SAB server died, I tried to pick up a used 8-core (dual 4-core) Xeon 1U server that had 32GB ram, but it was WAY too noisy to use in my home office closet, so I had to scape up something to use. I then tried to use an old Raspberry PI B I had lying about, but the downloads there were horrendous. I then remembered I still had my wife's old PowerMac G4 on my book shelf, which is what I am using now. Eventually I am thinking I'd like to pick up an i5 Dual Core Mac Mini to replace it, but that might be a while down the road when I can free up about $500 for the purchase.

[sander]

If you set SAB's logging to +Debug and restart SAB, in sabnzbd.log you will see a line like:

Code: Select all

DEBUG::[SABnzbd:1332] CPU Pystone available performance is 79076

(This is the result on an April 2011 Core i3)

So: What does is your old PowerMac G4's Pystone number?

On Linux, you can do this:

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$ cat ~/.sabnzbd/logs/sabnzbd.log | grep CPU
2015-03-22 20:18:45,590::DEBUG::[sabnzbdplus:1294] CPU Pystone available performance is 63861
2015-03-22 20:18:45,591::DEBUG::[sabnzbdplus:1298] CPU model name is Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU       M 370  @ 2.40GHz
2015-03-22 21:31:21,948::DEBUG::[SABnzbd:1332] CPU Pystone available performance is 79076
2015-03-22 21:31:21,949::DEBUG::[SABnzbd:1344] CPU model name is Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU       M 370  @ 2.40GHz

[mbabauer]

I think this is the problem:

Code: Select all

2015-03-24 20:31:16,764::DEBUG::[SABnzbd:1306] CPU Pystone available performance is 28618

I think someone mentioned you need a score of 50k or higher?

[sander]

I think this is the problem:

Code: Select all

2015-03-24 20:31:16,764::DEBUG::[SABnzbd:1306] CPU Pystone available performance is 28618

I think someone mentioned you need a score of 50k or higher?

Well, you don't need 50.000, but a Pystone of 28.618 is quite low for current standards. So that is the explanation for your high CPU load and your download speeds.

[mbabauer]

Well I guess at this point there isn't much I can do. Luckily I usually do most my downloading at night anyway, so it shouldn't matter much.

As a side-question, would it be advisable to pursue the Mac Mini i5 dual core (pre 2014 edition) if I can find one? I am trying to go from the enormous tower I was using prior to something a bit smaller. And since NAS drives have increasingly gotten more affordable, it doesn't make sense to have a huge tower any more with a ton of drives anyway.

[sander]

As a side-question, would it be advisable to pursue the Mac Mini i5 dual core (pre 2014 edition) if I can find one?

Any i5 Core should be a perfect machine for SAB downloading, assuming it has at least 4GB of RAM.

[jermainesky]

Thanks jumpup you are genius!!!!!!

It now works at full line speed!

Amazing man, really amazing from 32K to 941K just like that.