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News Server

MartyPop
Rising Star
Posts: 137
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Registered: ‎01-10-2014

News Server

Is it just me or is the PlusNet News Server slooooooooooooow?Huh
20 REPLIES 20
Petard
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Registered: ‎22-08-2011

Re: News Server

All right here (Force 9, but I assume it all maps to the same server).
Marksfish
Seasoned Pro
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Re: News Server

Fisrt time I used the news server today since leaving F9  about 10 years ago. Sadly all the groups I used to visit have run down, replaced my forums, trolls and spammers  Angry
Didn't download too slowly for me today, although I don't do binaries.
Mark
Chris
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Registered: ‎05-04-2007

Re: News Server

No issues when I looked from home a few days ago. The server is only a text feed remember.
Former Plusnet Staff member. Posts after 31st Jan 2020 are not on behalf of Plusnet.
MartyPop
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Registered: ‎01-10-2014

Re: News Server

Downloading 450 text articles via the PN news server last Saturday took just over SIX minutes, whereas downloading the same 450 text articles via a different news server on the same day took less than a minute.
jelv
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Registered: ‎10-04-2007

Re: News Server

In Thunderbird going to subscribe to a new group to test speeds it downloaded the list of groups at 50kB/s. Downloading headers of 1000 messages was almost instant.
However setting the group to sync for offline so it downloaded the message bodies was excruciatingly slow - around 60 messages per minute - so slow it didn't register as traffic on NetWorX. The group I tested was plusnet.service.status.
Edit: I've posted on plusnet.service.customer-feedback about this.
jelv (a.k.a Spoon Whittler)
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MartyPop
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Registered: ‎01-10-2014

Re: News Server

Thanks for posting in the newsgroup.
BTW ..... I replied to your PM before reading your forum post Wink
Chris
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Re: News Server

Quote from: jelv
Edit: I've posted on plusnet.service.customer-feedback about this.

It's going to likely be next week when I can respond there, I need to get a newsreader installed and setup on my work laptop. If I get chance I'll dive on from home.
Former Plusnet Staff member. Posts after 31st Jan 2020 are not on behalf of Plusnet.
jelv
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Re: News Server

@MartyPop Bob and I have posted a few times on the p.s.c-f thread I started - I suggest you subscribe to that group to follow progress.
jelv (a.k.a Spoon Whittler)
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MartyPop
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Re: News Server

OK, will do but it won't be until tomorrow, thanks for the heads-up.
bobpullen
Community Gaffer
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Re: News Server

Are you still noticing this? Whilst it's still slower than I'd expect, articles seem to be coming down at around 250kbps for me now:

Edit: scrap that, it's actually around 85kbps. What is very peculiar, is that I've been doing more testing and some services I'd expect to perform better also download text articles at a comparative snail's pace e.g. premium Giganews and Easynews accounts saw the headers fly down at line speed, but the offline downloading of text articles using Thunderbird crawl at 150kbps and 35kbps respectively. Eternal September managed 250kbps (still only a fraction of the speed the headers were downloaded at). I'm beginning to think that there's some limiting factor that significantly slows the downloading of text articles for offline use? I've asked Giganews for their thoughts.

Bob Pullen
Plusnet Product Team
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MartyPop
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Posts: 137
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Registered: ‎01-10-2014

Re: News Server

I've just repeated my test and here's the figures:
- Number of articles = 447
- Size = ~900Kb
- Time to d/load = 5mins 50secs
I'll let you figure out the throughput  Smiley
In a nutshell, nothing's changed  Sad
bobpullen
Community Gaffer
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Re: News Server

I've been round the houses with Giganews regarding this one, and the verdict seems to be that it's due to the way the network is built/optimised (I've paraphrased the following somewhat).
[quote author="Giganews"]Retrieving a text article incurs extra latency. The overhead of the time it takes to send us the command, wait for us to find the article on disk, retrieve it, and send it back to you is much larger compared to the size of the article.
As the vast majority of our customers download large binary articles, the infrastructure is tuned for this.
As mentioned in my last post, Giganews' 'off the shelf' service exhibits similar problems, and a premium Easynews subscription is noticeably slower than both ours and Giganews' feeds. I started a thread in easynews.support a couple of weeks ago to see if I could get a second opinion there, but it's been to no avail (although we did find things to be a /little/ quicker when using a different news client).
The ticket we've raised with Giganews is still open, however I'm not sure there's a great deal we're going to be able to do to improve the situation. We've been advised that some tweaks have been made to help improve things but it doesn't look to have helped much Sad

Bob Pullen
Plusnet Product Team
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jelv
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Registered: ‎10-04-2007

Re: News Server

I guess the only answer is a reader that used multiple connections - but I've not come across a reader designed for text groups that does that.
jelv (a.k.a Spoon Whittler)
   Why I have left Plusnet (warning: long post!)   
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bobpullen
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Re: News Server

It was Forté I used that seemed a tad quicker.

Bob Pullen
Plusnet Product Team
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