Input on my download speed, 20MB/s max via Usenet

This may be silly, but I just want to confirm that I don’t have a real issue on my machine.

I have a 940/940 Mbps connection. I am only seeing a max of 20MB/s through my Usenet provider while seeing other people posting about theirs getting a decent amount more and maxing out their 1 Gig connection. I have to use about 46 out of my 50 connections to hit that 20 MB/s as well.

I am running and i3-10100 CPU with my cache drive being a WDS500G2B0A that has a read/write of 560/530 MB/s. I download directly to my Cache drive and use hard-linking for my media.

SABnzbd tells me that my folder read and write speeds are 218.7 MB/s and 194 MB/s respectively.

20 MB/s isn’t too much to complain about, but was just curious if something is going wrong somewhere.

Thank you.

Just curious, why do you use VPN for usenet? I don’t & wonder if I should, lol

I use it for torrents, but never have for usenet.

There are a few things that can affect DL speed. I would first check the number of connections allowed in your settings (in NZBget/SABnzbd). Confirm how many connections your Usenet provider allows and try increasing them.

https://nzbget.net/performance-tips

The other thing that helped me was putting your incomplete downloads folder on an ssd/nvme. Even though an HDD should allow 100mbps write speed, I found that my Usenet downloads worked much better when writing to my NVME drive.

Obligatory ‘8b = 1B’ and be sure of what you’re reading and writing.

Click the wrench icon in SAB and click the refresh symbol next to Internet Bandwidth and also do a 1 or 10g test download.

You are running a vpn correct?

There could be a lot of reasons for this. VPN, VPN Client, Usenet, Storage Destination, CPU. (Assuming you have a VPN)

Remember, your VPN is encrypted traffic, most likely limited to the speed of 1 core. (Unless you bond vpn tunnels to get it onto 2 cores) I would think your 10100 is still plenty fast to squeeze out at least 50MB/s. But may depend on your encryption cypher and the VPN you’re using, and other services sharing that core.
The VPN server you connect to will make a big difference as well.

I’m able to get my full Gigabit Speed, ~105MB/s. But I have a decent usnet provider with 100 connections. I’m also running the VPN on pfsense with 2 bonded VPN tunnels, on a firewall that has a decent i5 CPU to handle that decryption. 1 tunnel/core only gets me to about 60MB/s. And I’m writing to a SSD.

I am so glad you posted this OP. I was averaging 20-30MB/s without VPN (SSL for Usenet) and never bothered to tweak the settings because I don’t download much.

After reading the comments here, I made a few changes namely

  1. Increasing server connections to the providers max (50 in my case)
  2. Setting equal priority for all servers
  3. Setting max download speed to 1000 Mbps (full 1GB connection)
  4. Disabling direct unpack and
  5. Pausing downloads when files are in post-processing.

MASSIVE jump in performance, now downloading at 100MB/s. Such a huge difference.

Sometimes adding too many connections will kill your speed because of the overhead from maintaining all those connections. I can easily hit 100MB/s with my max connections set to 15. I can probably get there with fewer. The recommendations I read said to start with 8 and keep increasing by 2 until you don’t see any improvement.

look at cpu usage, check if only 1 core is getting loaded.

What tariff you paying for? Some usenet providers limit speed based on what you pay.

Sorry this isn’t about the OP, but I’m a complete noob to Usenet. Anyone know of some good tutorials? I understand only the basics. It it much better than torrents? Specifically for music content? I find that a lot of public torrents don’t have the music I’m after a lot of the time, so I use soulseek.

it could be a bunch of factors from routing, to normal network issues, bottlenecking elsewhere, etc

for reference, i saturate my gbit on usenet almost every single time, using 20 concurrent connections

Try a different ethernet cable.

agreed. If you use SSL on nzbget you’re covered.

VPNs are a waste of time for usenet.

For Torrents a VPN is recommended, but if you’re using Usenet and have SSL set up, a VPN is unnecessary.

They both, essentially, provide the same thing: encrypting your data that your downloading to keep prying eyes like your isp from seeing what you’re downloading.

VPNs do this by rerouting your data through their servers, whereas SSL connections with your Usenet provider use end to end encryption.

This is my first month of using Usenet. In my head it is better safe than sorry? But if it isn’t needed I can easily remove it. I know some ISP has issues though from my research. The docker had a VPN option and followed what I knew with my torrent docker.

Yep, I have increased connections. The max my provider allows is 50 and have tried every number up to 50.

From my understanding everything writes to my SSD, even incomplete.

Agree with this, the vpn as mentioned above as well as I wonder if enabling turbo write would help.

Agreed. But 940 Mbps is something like 115 MB/s if I am not mistaken? Which is still well under the 560/530 MB/s that WD claims and the 218.7/194 MB/s SAB claims for the the read/write speeds.

I often get this confused, but tried to triple check I got it right for this post.

Yes I am using a VPN (Air) and doing the 10gb and 1gb test is how I am seeing the constant 20MB/s download speed. The internet bandwidth in SAB shows 7.4 MB/s and 59.2 Mbps.