stability / performance problems

[madshi]

Hey,

generally altbinz works great for me. However, there are several problems not related to features which are sometime driving me crazy and which IMHO really need an improvement:

(1) Sometimes when I double click on the altbinz TrayIcon nothing happens for several seconds (up to 30 seconds!), until suddenly altbinz decides to show up.
(2) Sometimes when I double click on the altbinz TrayIcon altbinz never comes up and is dead in the water. Right clicking the TrayIcon doesn't give even give me a context menu, anymore. The only chance I have in this situation is to terminate altbinz via task manager and restart it. Unfortunately in this situation often the PARs are remembered incorrectly, so repairing doesn't work. I've had this problem about 5 times in the last couple of days.
(3) When altbinz starts, it shows a full screen gray screen first for about 10-20 seconds before it is really available.
(4) Generally altbinz eats *a lot* of resources / performance. My whole PC gets kind of sluggish when altbinz is running, especially while decoding is done.
(5) Sometimes when the altbinz main window is open, it totally freezes for a number of seconds until it suddenly comes back again.

This may all be catalyzed by me having a list of dozens of extremely big download tasks in altbinz. E.g. right now I've 50 download tasks in altbinz, each of which is about 10-40GB big.

The uTorrent client behaves much more predictable and resource friendly. No matter how many tasks I have in uTorrent and no matter how big the download/upload rates, I barely notice that uTorrent is running at all. And it is always responsive to user input and never freezes etc...

Having said all this, I really like altbinz. But these stability & performance issues are really starting to get on my nerves.

Thanks!! 

[freeop]

Really not for sure if this has anything to do with your problems, but on Points 1 and 2, all I ever do is SINGLE click the TrayIcon and Alt.binz pops up for me.

Personally, I am not bothered THAT much with the processing of files and unraring, etc. But then again I don't have a huge que either. Maybe at the most 5 to 10 DVD's at a time.

As for uTorrent and the Torrent system, I have not used them in a long long time. The main reason I left the torrent files was the speed that it took to download files. It used to take like 3 to 4 days to download a full DVD and that was if you had a few seeders that stayed online more. I came back to Usenet as it would only take 2 to 4 Hours to download the same size full DVD. I am sure this has all changed but I also don't like the idea that my IP is broadcast all over the net when I would download or seed files. Maybe I am a little paranoid, but I feel like Usenet and the SSL connections with my servers don't publish my IP as much as the torrent system does.

I guess what I am saying is I made my choice on using the Usenet and I can accept the little differences that come with that choice. All I personally do is schedule everything to download when I am not going to be using my computer, late at night, when I am gone from home, etc. That was I am not bothered by the slow down of the processing.

Ok just wanted to let you know to try single clicking the tray icon and see if that helped.

[Mystic2010]

Could you perhaps tell us what OS you're running, what your system specs are? Also, have you tried playing with the Priority settings for decoding under setup?

[madshi]

XPSP2, Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM. Haven't played with priority settings yet.

One thing I've just noticed: If I let altbinz run in paused state, it's periodically eating memory like crazy and then releasing it again. I can see in the Task Manager memory consumption goes up from 5MB to 650MB and then after a minute or two it goes slowly back to 5MB (this process takes 2-3 minutes). Then it goes up to 650MB again and so on. Furthermore in the period where the RAM grows to 650MB harddisk is making a lot of seeking noise. This is usually when the PC gets sluggish. I guess this is caused by the periodic saving of the waiting list? It seems to me that there is a lot of room for optimization...   

[madshi]

P.S: This phase where RAM consumption is growing to 650MB is also exactly the phase where altbinz does not react to any user input. It's totally frozen during this time. The whole process of growing to 650MB can take from 5-20 seconds. Maybe if I have bad luck and try to click on the tray icon while altbinz is in this unresponsive phase, maybe then altbinz freezes forever? Just guessing here, though...

It seems all this is caused by my waiting list of 50 big items. But 50 isn't that much, is it? I could easily add in 200 more! But I guess I should better not...   

[Rdl]

P.S: This phase where RAM consumption is growing to 650MB is also exactly the phase where altbinz does not react to any user input. It's totally frozen during this time. The whole process of growing to 650MB can take from 5-20 seconds. Maybe if I have bad luck and try to click on the tray icon while altbinz is in this unresponsive phase, maybe then altbinz freezes forever? Just guessing here, though...

It seems all this is caused by my waiting list of 50 big items. But 50 isn't that much, is it? I could easily add in 200 more! But I guess I should better not...   

Define 50 big items. How large is queue file with those same 50 items?

[davidq666]

...
(3) When altbinz starts, it shows a full screen gray screen first for about 10-20 seconds before it is really available.
...

this happens to me most of the time since i started using vista, but here it take about 1min:

[14.01.2008 07:49:36] [Main] Alt.Binz 0.27.0 [01.12.2007] started.
[14.01.2008 07:49:36] [Main] Windows Vista detected
[14.01.2008 07:50:44] [Main] Download queue list ageing done in 0ms
[14.01.2008 07:50:44] [Main] 3450 items loaded into download history list in 32ms.
[14.01.2008 07:50:44] [Main] 0 outdated items removed from download history list in 0ms.
[14.01.2008 07:50:45] [Main] Download queue autosaved in 94ms
[14.01.2008 07:50:45] [Main] RSS tree autosaved in 15ms
[14.01.2008 07:50:45] [T1] Hello
[14.01.2008 07:50:45] [T2] Hello
[14.01.2008 07:50:45] [T3] Hello
[14.01.2008 07:50:45] [T4] Hello
[14.01.2008 07:50:45] [T5] Hello
[14.01.2008 07:50:45] [T6] Hello
[14.01.2008 07:50:45] [T7] Hello
[14.01.2008 07:50:45] [T8] Hello
[14.01.2008 07:51:36] [Main] Download queue autosaved in 93ms
[14.01.2008 07:51:36] [Main] RSS tree autosaved in 0ms
[14.01.2008 07:52:36] [Main] Download queue autosaved in 78ms
[14.01.2008 07:52:36] [Main] RSS tree autosaved in 15ms

[madshi]

Define 50 big items. How large is queue file with those same 50 items?

Just checked. It's 348MB big.

Alternative suggestion:
You could make a queue folder instead of a single queue file. In the folder you could store every download task into a separate queue file with the same format that the current queue file has. The names of the task files could be random or just with an increasing number. The periodic saving of the queue could then be limited to those task queue files which really have changed. And you could then also only keep those tasks in RAM which are currently actively downloading. For the other tasks it would be enough to just hold the information is RAM which is needed for the GUI. Probably there'd need to be another file which stores the order in which the tasks are sorted. But during startup altbinz should also not rely on the file where the order is stored, but it should enumerate all files in the queue folder.

It's just a suggestion, but I think it would help supporting an unlimited number of download tasks without any performance problems...

P.S: Oh, and periodic saving of the download queue should be done in a secondary thread so that the GUI reaction time is not affected.

Thanks...   

[Hecks]

Better: the queue could be a databse updated dynamically with changes only.

[madshi]

Better: the queue could be a databse updated dynamically with changes only.

That would also be just fine with me, as long as I wouldn't have to install MySQL or anything of that sort to make altbinz work... 

[madshi]

Another update:

I've totally disabled the periodic saving of the queue list and that seems to fix the problems with stability and also with the unresponsive GUI. There are still situations where altbinz read/writes the queue list (with all the negative behaviour), of course, so not all is well, but altbinz is back to useable for me with the periodic saving disabled. I think if Rdl could rewrite/optimize the queue list loading/saving, that would be a major step forward.

Thanks!

[bundo]

Hello there.

I would like to add up on this performance issue.

Being a recent adept of alt.binz I have tested it heavily lately. For me it is an excellent tool but indeed I  have noticed some performance issues:

1) I need at least 15 threads to reach my max D/L speed whereas I would need 10 or less with other grabbers. Has anyone noticed it too ?

2) One of the side effects it seems to introduce (but maybe the source is elsewhere) is that it eats up much of my PC resources (I have 2GB RAM). I have noticed at least 2 times that if I perform other tasks (at the same time I dl) that have an impact on the system performance (burn a DVD, iTunes, play a divx etc...), a lot of the items in the queue are not complete on the disk. For example, yesterday, on 90 rar files of 50MB each downloaded, at least half of them were reported as being incomplete on the disk. It usually misses 2 to 3 MB The post was 50 days old so for sure the files are complete on the server. If I delete those files and dl again they come complete on the disk.

Does someone have a workaround ? I have put alt.binz as being low priority process and now I am going also to disable the periodic queue saving and see ...

Thanks

[Mystic2010]

1) I need at least 15 threads to reach my max D/L speed whereas I would need 10 or less with other grabbers. Has anyone noticed it too ?

Tried playing with the process priority of decoding? I noticed that when putting it on lower or even idle, my connection finally maxed out again.

[bundo]

I have again tried tonight and only 2 files could not d/l correctly this time.

Can someone try this search "twdgnnprs" on newsleech and grab the one from binaries-4-ever :