SABnzbd Forums

Hello all,

I'm pretty sure this is not a sabnzbd bug, but I thought I'd try explaining my problem here and see if anyone can help me with this problem.
I have sabnzbd installed on a server (running XP SP1), which is a Athlon XP1800+ with 512mb ram and a 40gig IDE harddrive. Connected to it, is a external USB (1) harddrive (500gig). Now here is my problem:
Downloading goes fine (+- 2mb/sec), but both unrarring and par checking goes extremely slow. Check out these figures for a 4.6 dvd file (split up in ~90 rar files):

Stage Par2
[PAR-INFO] bmovpal: => Verified in 4826.0s, all files correct
[DEL-INFO] bmovpal: => Deleted 2 file(s)

Stage Unrar
[RAR-INFO] bmovpal: => Unpacked 1 file(s) in 11023.0s
[DEL-INFO] bmovpal: => Deleted 95 file(s)

As you can see it takes almost 16.000 seconds (which is more than 4.5hours!!!!!!), to complete the process. This even excludes any possible repairing (which you can imagine takes even longer).

Now I'm pretty sure this is not a sabnzbd issue; I have it installed on my laptop (which is less is specs compared to my server), and on my laptop it 'only' takes about 10 minutes to par2/unrar.

My question is this: anyone know what the issues could be? I'm sure it is not the usb external drive, since unrarring/par2'ing it on my internal drives takes the same time.

first of all, how fast is your external harddrive? how log does it take to par check and unrar it manually (quickpar and winrar you can use to do this). Do you do any other heavy process at the same time like gaming (server), video editing, active webserver, active ftp server or anything else?

DeXeS wrote: first of all, how fast is your external harddrive? how log does it take to par check and unrar it manually (quickpar and winrar you can use to do this). Do you do any other heavy process at the same time like gaming (server), video editing, active webserver, active ftp server or anything else?

The external drive is a 7200rpm SATA drive. The server does not do anything besides sabnzbd (and serve some files to my popcornhour media player, but that does not take any processes). THe strange thing is, when unrarring/par2ing, it does not take a lot of system resources. CPU resources are below 2%, and only a few mb of memory is used. So that could not be the case.

Using winrar takes the same long time. I'm pretty clueless, it must be some XP setting of some sort 

You're performing already-lengthy I/O-intensive operations over a relatively slow USB 2.0 link. Don't do that. There's nothing we can do to help you with your situation apart from telling you not to do that.

inpheaux wrote: You're performing already-lengthy I/O-intensive operations over a relatively slow USB 2.0 link. Don't do that. There's nothing we can do to help you with your situation apart from telling you not to do that.

That's strange, because when I hook up that same external disk to my laptop (again, over usb 1.1), and unrar to it, it only takes around 10 minutes. Why would there be such a big difference between my laptop and server, even considering that my laptop has less memory and a lesser cpu.

but when you unrar on the from the local disk to the local disk (leaving out the usb drive). does that unrar/par normal?

DeXeS wrote: but when you unrar on the from the local disk to the local disk (leaving out the usb drive). does that unrar/par normal?

Nope, it does not  I find this really strange, so I think the problem lies within XP or the internal drive (sabnzbd uses it for caching)

I think the only thing that can make it the fast as possible on the external drive is to install sabnzbd+ in the external drive inclusive the cache folder and userdata. This can be the reason why it's so slow.

I have a USB 2.0 Harddrive hooked up to my Ubuntu server (an old Pentium III)
My last DVD5 job took only 320 seconds to unrar (from the internal hard drive to the external drive).
That's not bad.
Actually the par2 program needed 520 seconds to verify without repairs (that is on the internal drive).

I'm sure there something odd with your PC and harddrive combination. Is is USB 2.0 or 1.1 ?

shypike wrote: I have a USB 2.0 Harddrive hooked up to my Ubuntu server (an old Pentium III)
My last DVD5 job took only 320 seconds to unrar (from the internal hard drive to the external drive).
That's not bad.
Actually the par2 program needed 520 seconds to verify without repairs (that is on the internal drive).

I'm sure there something odd with your PC and harddrive combination. Is is USB 2.0 or 1.1 ?

As mentioned above, it is 1.1. But I hardly think this should and is the problem (because on my laptop, which is also 1.1 it works fine). Now when I copy a file from the external drive to my internal, or the other way around, the transfer rate is only 900kb/sec!! Obviously this should be way higher, around 20mb/sec. Now what do you think the problem could be? A bus-rate setting of some sort? I have no clue

By the way, thanks for all your suggestions and comments. I really appreciate all the help!

If you have usb 1.1, the speed of copying from the internal drive to the external drive through usb 1.1 cannot be 20mb/sec. the max of usb 1.1 is 12mbit (1536 kb/sec) at optimal conditions. from the external drive to the external drive can get to 20mb/sec (or something like that)

But since the speed of unrarring an parring is the same from the internal drive to the internal drive as it is from the internal drive to the external drive, there must be something else going on... virus? spyware? broken xp installation?