Usenet at a standstill

[#1]

Usenet almost at a standstill using either news.metronent.co.uk or news.plus.net. Takes 90 seconds to load headers 20 sesonds to load a individual page of text.
Appreciate it if someone could get the hammer out.
Regards
Rockradio

[#2]

We've noticed it here too, it could very well be caused by the slightly imbalanced platform due to some issues over the weekend, combined with Microsoft patch Tuesday. We expect it to get back to normal shortly.

[#3]

Slow usenet speeds here to, i'm using usenetserver.com

[#4]

Hi,
Binary downloads are certainly being slowed down by the amount of Windows update traffic on the network, gold was over 3Gbps of traffic at 9am this morning, normally it's around 2 - 2.5Mbps at that time. Estimate is around 550Mbps of Windows update traffic. As a consequence non-interactive traffic like P2P and usenet will have been slowed down by the traffic prioritisation.

[#5]

Quote from: dave

Hi, Binary downloads are certainly being slowed down by the amount of Windows update traffic on the network, gold was over 3Gbps of traffic at 9am this morning, normally it's around 2 - 2.5Mbps at that time. Estimate is around 550Mbps of Windows update traffic. As a consequence non-interactive traffic like P2P and usenet will have been slowed down by the traffic prioritisation.

Thanks to Chris and Dave for quick replies. Still slow as a donkey at 1230 15/08/07.
Just a thought. Would it be possible to give some priority to text only usenet. The problems always seems to be associated with binary downloads clogging up things and us text only users of usenet seem to loose out on our miniscule usage because of a lot of binary traffic. 
Kind Regards
Rockradio

[#6]

Text only servers should get a higher priority on the network, we are though looking to see whether there is a problem with the config for our news server (well Supernews) to make sure that it is being picked up correctly, the Windows update traffic is certainly having an effect on the network, but not as much as I would expect on text.
Be interested to see if you see the same performance on the news server news.microsoft.com as that's prioritised as a text only server.

[#7]

news.microsoft.com IS slow.  But it's about two or three times as fast as the Plusnet servers

[#8]

Just done some tests downloading headers:
5 min header download, same newsgroup from each server (except MS):

Easynews	~44 kbits/s
Giganews	~42 kbits/s
Plusnet	~32 kbits/s
Microsoft	~600 kbits/s

Windows update : ~5400 kbits/s over a period of 20 mins (new Vista install, downloading all updates) so I would say that it's not a local issue (busy exchange etc)

[#9]

Does news.microsoft.com carry binaries? I'm sure I had this put in the Gold traffic queue some time last year.
Seems suspicious that it's worse than Easynews and Giganews though as they have a very low priority on the network as it is? 
Could it perhaps be a problem Microsoft side?

[#10]

1630 15/08/07 now working just how it should. Both news.metronet.co.uk and news.plus.net now loading headers and messages within a second.
What ever you did. Thank you.
Rockradio

[#11]

Should all be working OK now, we found a problem with the traffic management profiling. I suspect the increased amount of Windows update traffic yesterday and today is what made it come to light.

[#12]

On a related note I am seeing very odd behaviour with usenet downloads from giganews. Running up to midnight I routinely obtain download speeds of 3-4Mbps. As the clock strikes 12 this immediately drops away and becomes erratic. It is now varying between absolute zero and ~700kbps.
Aren't we supposed to go from peak to off-peak at midnight? It feels a bit like the other way around. As a result I now try and get downloads in before midnight if I can!

[#13]

Yes, must admit I've noticed similar over the past few months.
USENET (using external providers) between 9/10am and 4pm can be pitifuly slow like yesterday afternoon. After 4pm it's much faster - near line speed at times (6Mbps) and then between midnight and 1am it slows down again.
I'm guessing the slow down is due to a sudden increase in downloads - people scheduling downloads to start at midnight combined with the network management profile changes - everything seems ok after about 1am.
But why its better at peak-time versus 9am-4pm I've no idea.

[#14]

Hi,
It's probably because a lot of customers on Premier or Plus stop downloading at 4pm (as this is the start of peak time) and start again at midnight (the start of off-peak).
Certainly after 2am the network is much much quieter, and there's some nice spare capacity for downloading (this is when you tend to see Usenet downloading at line speed ;))

[#15]

Quote from: dave

Hi, Binary downloads are certainly being slowed down by the amount of Windows update traffic on the network, gold was over 3Gbps of traffic at 9am this morning, normally it's around 2 - 2.5Mbps at that time. Estimate is around 550Mbps of Windows update traffic. As a consequence non-interactive traffic like P2P and usenet will have been slowed down by the traffic prioritisation.

Looks like we weren't the only ones affected by this.