anyway to speed up decoding?

[steve51184]

hey guys i've just upgraded my internet to 50mbits and downloading large amounts of data (7gb for example) will cause a lot of decoding as the downloads and downloading faster then altbinz can decode them so by the time the download has finished there's still a few file to decode adding a few mins more to the download

i've set the decode priority to 'higher' but it didn't really help... any other suggestions?

[dacaid]

I believe there won't be any satisfying answer for you
You could either "pause DL while decoding" or upgrade your computer (faster CPU, better RAM, solid-state disk, those 3 are good for decoding, but every other part must be in accordance like a good motherboard)

[steve51184]

You could either "pause DL while decoding"

but that would significantly slow the downloads down so how would that help?

what i want is the decoding to be faster so i don't waste 1-2mins after the download is done for the decoding to finish

upgrade your computer

well i have a quad core @ 2.4ghz and i guess forgot to mention the decoding is fine if i'm not doing anything cpu intensive like converting video etc but if i am then it's slow at decoding

isn't there a multi threaded way of doing this as that'd REALLY speed things up?

[davidq666]

well i have a quad core @ 2.4ghz and i guess forgot to mention the decoding is fine if i'm not doing anything cpu intensive like converting video etc but if i am then it's slow at decoding

isn't there a multi threaded way of doing this as that'd REALLY speed things up?

nope, at least not yet the only thing thats supports multithreading would be the par2.exe, but u could try useing Article chaching:

https://www.altbinz.net/wiki/Advanced_Setup#Download_.232

if it's the hdd and not the cpu slowing you down it might help

[Hecks]

I think if we're only talking 1-2 mins extra the issue is somewhat trivial.

[Watcher]

Not only is it trivial, but what is alt.binz supposed to do if the user is running an application that's sucking up all the CPU? It's a zero sum game. If app A is taking up 75% of the CPU (or 3 of the 4 cores), there's only 25% left (1 core) left to work with. It's not exactly that simple, but the principle is the same. If you really want alt.binz to run faster, give the video conversion app lower priority (I always run this at low priority anyway), or set its affinity to 1 core.

I forget which version is was, but rdl made a _significant_ change to the decoding logic and it's supremely faster. So much so that my P4, which was never previously able to keep up with downloading on my 32mbps connection, suddenly could.

[steve51184]

rdl?

[davidq666]

as stated before useing articel cache is always a good idea and try limiting AB to one of the 4 cores and the video conversion to the remaining 3. since altbinz afaik only uses one core this way the decoding speed should not suffer from the cpu hunger of the conversion software.

[steve51184]

or make the decoding multi-threaded

[davidq666]

or make the decoding multi-threaded

yeah it would be nice, if want that make a request for it in the request forum. if u are the patient type u might get lucky and see it somewhere down the line :-)

[Hecks]

I think we've already established that would have little to no impact if a) you're running another CPU-intensive task like video encoding at the same time and/or b) hard-drive writes is the bottleneck. You've had proposed solutions to your 'problem' in this thread, which you can continue to ignore at your leisure. Or you could actually try them and post your results here.

[Rekrul]

Why not decode each part as it downloads? That way there wouldn't be 50+ parts to decode at once.

[davidq666]

Why not decode each part as it downloads? That way there wouldn't be 50+ parts to decode at once.

that is the normal way it works each file is decoded after download

[Rekrul]

that is the normal way it works each file is decoded after download

Yes, I'm aware that that's the way it works. What I'm suggesting is that it might cause less of a delay if the program were changed to decode each part as it downloads.

As it is now, each part is saved separately in its encoded form, to the temp dir. If each part was decoded on the fly, then when all the parts were finished, it would only have to join the parts together. Going further, it could join consecutive parts together as it goes. Binary New Reaper 2 does this and as a result, it never has to pause to decode large files. The second the last part finishes downloading, the file is done.

It's also a more efficient use of disk space since you're not keeping an encoded copy of the entire file.

[freelance86]

It's also a more efficient use of disk space since you're not keeping an encoded copy of the entire file.

if you set up article caching correctly it does not write to the disk until it decodes, all encoded parts are stored in ram then decoded to hdd