Simultaneous downloads?

[ghostcorps]

Hi Guys,

Pardon my ignorance, but is there any way to download more than one file at a time? I just woke up after my first night with this running to find one finished file and another only just started, so I spent the rest of the day trying to find an answer to this, with no luck. Am I missing something?

I have SABnzbd 0.4.11 on FreeBSD 7.0 Release, with Supernews and Newzbin in case that helps

Thanks for your time.

[ghostcorps]

Thanks Dimes,

I wasn't aware that the available bandwidth was so high. I am used to maintaining a list of 20 or 30 incoming torrents, which is necessary given that depending on the seeders some small files could take hours and some (very) large files have been known to take months. With a constant bandwidth, this is not such an issue

If I was going to take this query one step further, my reasoning for suggesting it may still be worthwhile would be as follows:
 
Suppose I want a 70gig archive, I am in Australia so it may still take me a week or more If I was able to split that bandwidth over two files, I could get other smaller files in the meantime. Granted it will make the archive take twice as long, but I would not notice it as I am getting other things in the meantime. It's like backing up via ftp, while one iso is copying across I still get 1000's of songs done.


Anyway, I can work around that easy enough. But I had to ask

Thanks again

[switch]

Priorities in the upcoming 0.5 release would probably be your best bet.

You could set the large download to be low priority so other items are added above it and get downloaded, or add other items as a high priority to download first.

Simultaneous downloading is a waste of time as it can double/triple the time before you get ANY downloads, instead of trickling the downloads at even intervals.

[ghostcorps]

Thanks for the suggestions Switch

[MonkeyFighter]

I would like to point out that some of the major news providers appear to be using a near-line storage system for older postings.  Consequently, retrieving these older postings results in much slower transfers than more recent postings.  It does not matter how many simultaneous nntp connections are enabled, total bandwidth remains roughly constant.  However, kicking off a second nntp client to download a completely seperate set of postings - even old and slow ones - results in better bandwidth utilization.  So, it is significantly faster to download two distinct postings in parallel than it is to do them serially.  Twice as fast if you have enough bandwidth.

This behaviour has been observed with both giganews and astraweb by many users in certain communities.  It should be fairly easy to verify with a subscription to either provider and a couple of nzbs for files posted 150+ days ago.  Note that astraweb, at least, appears to have some sort of caching such that transferring the same postings twice in a row makes the second transfer go much faster.  Giganews wasn't that smart last time I tested (about 5 months ago).

[daniel_owen_uk]

Couldn't that be the ISP caching rather than the newshost?

[MonkeyFighter]

Do you know of a system that transparently caches nntp transfers?