FTTP 300Mbps Trial - Speed test results of 344, 337 and 333Mbps produced

[#1]

Quote from: Smash2u

Hi everyone, My first post! I've been on the 330Mbps trial for a couple of months now and am absolutely LOVING it!  However, the one area which doesn't meet quite meet my expectations is the speed I still get on usenet.  When I try speedtest/thinkbroadband etc., I can easily hit  220-250Mbps - but usenet maxes out at 9.2 MB/s (with an average of 6.5ish MB/s) when I should be 25+ MB/s (if I were to drop SSL).   Question for those who are on usenet: who is your service provider? I suspect that is probably the bottleneck here.  I'm currently on Astraweb's EU SSL connection and have tried everything from changing port numbers/connections etc and am still averaging close to 6 MB/s. Thoughts? Note - The connection is wired with a CAT6 cable to a 3rd generation time capsule. Thanks for your help! Best,

I mate, I'm on the 330 service and using Usenet as well.
I never see anywhere near the full bandwidth with usenet either (I'm with Astraweb ) but I see a higher number than you
From last night
Downloaded in 53 seconds at an average of 16.8 MB/s
Downloaded in 42 seconds at an average of 15.9 MB/s
Downloaded in 8 minutes 16 seconds at an average of 16.3 MB/s
These figures are with SSL on but if I remove it I get closer to 20 MB/s so still no where near what it should be but I gave up a longtime ago trying to search for the perfect speed as these speeds are more than quick enough for me
So to your problem, can you tell me more about your usenet setup because hardware and software come into play when you get to these kinds of speed
Si

[#2]

How many connections are you using to connect to Astraweb?

[#3]

If that question is to me I have 5 connections to one server. 5 connections to another server and 6 connections to a third server all at the same time.
I've tried 20 connections to 1 server. I've tried 1 connection to 1 server and I pretty much always end up with the same speed results
Si

[#4]

Thanks - that's exactly what I was after.
It increasingly looks to me as if there is some sort of rate limiting going on although I can't find anything in the support pages to suggest there is a limit. Someone from Plusnet care to comment?

[#5]

Guys,
Thanks for the prompt response.  Here is my setup:
Hardware:
Synology Diskstation 1511+ (5 3TB Hitachi 7200rpm drives)
Time Capsule (3rd Generation) via Cat6 Cable (Gigabit connection)
Software:
SABnzbd+ 0.7.5 on DSM 4.1
One server: 10 connections to ssl-eu.astraweb.com on port 563 (tried 443 as well)
Any suggestions on how I might try to debug this?
Thanks again,
Smash

[#6]

Your problem is your hardware. the processor in the NAS isn't capable of processing USENET downloads any faster than your getting now. That is your bottleneck.
To get any more speed your going to need to either use a computer or something with more processing power
I started my usenet life with a QNAP arm based NAS and this quickly became my bottleneck.
Si

[#7]

Quote from: jelv

Thanks - that's exactly what I was after. It increasingly looks to me as if there is some sort of rate limiting going on although I can't find anything in the support pages to suggest there is a limit. Someone from Plusnet care to comment?

If there you are seeing what appears to be rate limiting which isn't on the traffic management pages, it's not deliberate.

[#8]

Just to chuck my 2p in, I've recently been doing some testing that's involved downloading from various different Usenet providers over my 80Mbps FTTC connection. I found the connection maxed out irrespective of the provider used for most of the day but became 'choppy' on certain evenings. Whether this was caused by my rig, my local network, congestion between me and the Usenet provider or something else I'm not sure. All I know is:

• I got varying results depending on the Usenet provider I used e.g. Astraweb seemed to give better evening speeds compared to Usenetserver.
  
• Traffic managment wasn't a factor because the speeds would become 'choppy' even if I switched across to a Pro profile.
  

The providers I alternated between were Astraweb, Usenetserver, Easynews, Giganews and Astraweb. My specs are Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1, Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 OC'd @ 3GHz, 4.00 GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 400MHz (5-5-5-18), 1TB SAMSUNG HD103SI (SATA).
It was certainly interesting to see hardware/software limitations causing a bottleneck e.g. SABnzbd would intermittently max one of my cores out when I threw a lot of data at it which would have the effect of pausing/resuming the download every few seconds. It's for this reason that I carried out a lot of my testing using the 64-bit version of Newsbin Pro.
Higher speeds definitely give you a hell of a lot more to consider when trying to diagnose a speed/throughput problem.
e.g. here's a snapshot from a few weeks back taken mid afternoon one day:

Then later that evening around 8.00pm:

Shortly before midnight:

The following morning:

That was Usenetserver. Admittedly one of the worst performing providers but you get the picture.

[#9]

Thanks everyone.  I will try this now directly on computer and report back results.

[#10]

So how did you get on with the speeds on your PC?
Si