Cannot download at full speed

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kevindd992002
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Cannot download at full speed

Post by kevindd992002 »

I live in the Philippines and recently just upgraded my Internet connection to 100Mbps Fiber. I just noticed that when I download from my Usenet provider (NewsHosting) using Sab, I only get around half the speed of my subscription considering I already use 30 connections. I know this server farm is located in the USA and distance is possibly the limiting factor here but I just downloaded an Nvidia GPU driver from a US server as well and I get the full speed. I also tried downloading using 10 and 20 connections and it seems that the 30 connections (max allowed on my subscription) gives me the fastest speed.

I tried using another newsreader (NH's newsreader) and it gives me the same speed. I have enough RAM and CPU and are not really being bottlenecked. Article cache limit is already set to 450M in Sab.

Here's a result of my testing to different NH servers:

Doing 30 connections to news.newshosting.com @ port 119 resulted to a 6MBps download speed (which is around 60Mbps out of my 100Mbps connection)
Doing 30 connection to news.fr7.newshosting.com @ port 119 resulted to a 3MBps download speed (which is around 30Mbps out of my 100Mbps connection)
Doing 30 connection to news.ams.newshosting.com @ port 119 resulted to a 700KBps download speed (which is around 7Mbps out of my 100Mbps connection)

What do you think is the problem here?
ALbino
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by ALbino »

Try splitting your connections with their EU server as well. Or add a secondary primary provider.

Also, you could look at Giganews which has a Hong Kong server for Asian customers. You'll have to ask them about it directly, because they don't publicly offer it.
kevindd992002
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by kevindd992002 »

I already tried splitting the connections with theit EU servers and the resulting speed was even slower.

So is this really a problem with geographical location of servers and nothing in Sab?
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sander
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by sander »

kevindd992002 wrote:
So is this really <snip> nothing in Sab?
You already answered that yourself:
I tried using another newsreader (NH's newsreader) and it gives me the same speed.
kevindd992002
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by kevindd992002 »

Yes, I got that. But I was wondering if there's a specific setting in both newsreaders that's limiting my speed?
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sander
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by sander »

kevindd992002 wrote:Yes, I got that. But I was wondering if there's a specific setting in both newsreaders that's limiting my speed?
Probably not in the newsreaders.

Possible causes:
- ISP speed / throttling
- hardware
- network
- (and as you say) distance / delay

Did you contact Newshosting? Mention that you use the Newshosting newsreader
kevindd992002
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by kevindd992002 »

I don't think my ISP is throttling anything as I can get full speeds when I download from Nvidia's website (through HTTP). Using port 80 in Usenet still caps the speed at half the full speed.

I also don't think it's the hardware and network for the same reason above.

So I think we're left with distance and delay. I did contact Newshosting and I have an open ticket with them but I figured to post a thread here as well.
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sander
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by sander »

Out of curiosity: What is your ping time?

I get 3.5 ms on my fiber connection, from the 'ams' server ... probably AMSterdam, as I'm in the Netherlands.

Code: Select all

$ ping news.newshosting.com
PING news.ams.newshosting.com (81.171.92.224) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 81.171.92.224: icmp_seq=1 ttl=59 time=3.36 ms
64 bytes from 81.171.92.224: icmp_seq=2 ttl=59 time=3.63 ms
64 bytes from 81.171.92.224: icmp_seq=3 ttl=59 time=3.46 ms
If I use a different nameserver, I get a different name and IP address:

Code: Select all

$ host news.newshosting.com 8.8.8.8
news.newshosting.com is an alias for news.iad.newshosting.com.
news.iad.newshosting.com has address 69.16.179.28
news.iad.newshosting.com has address 69.16.179.29
... with 30 times bigger ping: 100ms:

Code: Select all

$ ping news.iad.newshosting.com
PING news.iad.newshosting.com (69.16.179.29) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 69.16.179.29: icmp_seq=1 ttl=59 time=107 ms
64 bytes from 69.16.179.29: icmp_seq=2 ttl=59 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 69.16.179.29: icmp_seq=3 ttl=59 time=106 ms
kevindd992002
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by kevindd992002 »

Yeah, news.newshosting.com seems to be a CNAME (Alias) for the other three A records depending on the region. For mine, it translates to news.iad.newshosting.com. Let me get a snippet of the ping times and I'll post back.
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sander
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by sander »

This could also be interesting: in your sabnzbd.log search the line with 'happyeyeballs' as it will tell which IP address was used for the newsserver:

Code: Select all

2016-05-24 22:17:49,889::INFO::[downloader:444] [email protected]: Initiating connection
2016-05-24 22:17:49,998::INFO::[happyeyeballs:111] Quickest IP address for news.newshosting.com (port 119, ssl 0, preferipv6 True) is 69.16.179.28
2016-05-24 22:17:49,999::DEBUG::[happyeyeballs:113] Happy Eyeballs lookup took 3.058 microseconds
2016-05-24 22:17:50,000::DEBUG::[downloader:121] For server news.newshosting.com, using IP 69.16.179.28 as server
So: the usenet connect only took 3 msec. That's fast.
kevindd992002
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by kevindd992002 »

It says microseconds actually, so usec which is even faster and insane. What I'm thinking about this is a DNS lookup result that's already in the cache of either my local DNS or my computer's local cache which is why it took that fast. What do you think?
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sander
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by sander »

kevindd992002 wrote:It says microseconds actually, so usec which is even faster and insane. What I'm thinking about this is a DNS lookup result that's already in the cache of either my local DNS or my computer's local cache which is why it took that fast. What do you think?
Ouch. I wrote that code myself in SABnzbd ... it's a mistake; it was "msec", and later changed it incorrectly to microsec instead of milisec.

I'll change it in the SABnzbd code.
kevindd992002
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by kevindd992002 »

That's what I thought, good catch though.

So is that speed the connection to the server itself or just DNS lookup for the A record IP address result?
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sander
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by sander »

kevindd992002 wrote:That's what I thought, good catch though.

So is that speed the connection to the server itself or just DNS lookup for the A record IP address result?
A DNS lookup plus a TCP connection (but no NNTP application layer stuff)
kevindd992002
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Re: Cannot download at full speed

Post by kevindd992002 »

Ok. That is indeed fast then. Here's what I have for pings:

---cut---
Pinging news.iad.newshosting.com [69.16.179.29] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 69.16.179.29: bytes=32 time=246ms TTL=50
Reply from 69.16.179.29: bytes=32 time=247ms TTL=50
Reply from 69.16.179.29: bytes=32 time=246ms TTL=50
Reply from 69.16.179.29: bytes=32 time=247ms TTL=50

Ping statistics for 69.16.179.29:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 246ms, Maximum = 247ms, Average = 246ms
---cut---

---cut---
Pinging news.ams.newshosting.com [81.171.92.238] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 81.171.92.238: bytes=32 time=335ms TTL=49
Reply from 81.171.92.238: bytes=32 time=335ms TTL=49
Reply from 81.171.92.238: bytes=32 time=334ms TTL=49
Reply from 81.171.92.238: bytes=32 time=334ms TTL=49

Ping statistics for 81.171.92.238:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 334ms, Maximum = 335ms, Average = 334ms
---cut---

---cut---
Pinging news.fr7.newshosting.com [81.171.118.134] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 81.171.118.134: bytes=32 time=353ms TTL=48
Reply from 81.171.118.134: bytes=32 time=346ms TTL=48
Reply from 81.171.118.134: bytes=32 time=353ms TTL=48
Reply from 81.171.118.134: bytes=32 time=350ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 81.171.118.134:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 346ms, Maximum = 353ms, Average = 350ms
---cut---

So yeah, I have crappy latency to the servers but that shouldn't explain the slow download speed. Sustained download speeds are not affected by pings. For what's it worth, here's what I have for Nvidia's download server:

Pinging a1437.d.akamai.net [96.7.54.107] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 96.7.54.107: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=51
Reply from 96.7.54.107: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=51
Reply from 96.7.54.107: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=51
Reply from 96.7.54.107: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 96.7.54.107:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 30ms, Maximum = 32ms, Average = 31ms
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