Article sticks at 99%

[Hamsandwich]

The thing is there is nothing to trouble shoot re. those threads that aren't connecting. They are working as they should. If I just disable two threads that won't be happening.

My global connection timeout is 999, as the servers I use can sometimes be unrespnsive and in this way I can prevent loss of connection. Delay between connection retries is 1, so that it keeps retrying often enough that I can get a connection for times when the server is under load (it has limited spots available, and that is the reason why there are so many could not connect errors in the log).

As I said this is how I have used AB for ages, I have experienced this behaviour before but it's been reletively isolated cases. It is happening always with these files I am currently downloading, the only difference that I can make out is the size of the individual .rar files is consistantly over 50mb, whereas previously not that much has had .rars quite that big.

[Hecks]

Seems a bit crazy to me to hammer server connects like that, but I guess whatever floats your boat.  Try with only one server as primary, and if you see the same problems then we'll have eliminated that as a cause - or don't, and continue believing what you want to.  This is assuming that the server isn't becoming "unresponsive" as you describe it halfway through downloading  large articles - in which case I'd probably expect to see behaviour somewhat like this, but Rdl will be able to tell you exactly what happens in these situations.

If I were you, I'd also 1) ask around other users of your service to see if they're experiencing the same, and 2) try with another client to see if something with Alt.Binz is the root cause or not.  That's all the advice I'm able to offer on this one.

[Jesus]

Cox ISP news servers?

[Hamsandwich]

Cox ISP news servers?

No.

@Hecks, what I mean by unresponsive is that sometimes a thread will hang partway through and just sit there, eventually timing out. As the servers were so overloaded at one point it could take hours just to connect, I didn't want to lose my connections once established so I set the timeout to max. Pretty much the same reason why I set the reconnects so fast and often.

Will be interested to see what RDL has to say, I guess I could try experimenting with settings anyway in the meantime.

Point 1, will do. Point 2, I don't wanna use any other client. 

[Rdl]

You're using those crappy SA servers? There are few more users and contributors from SA, so it would be interesting to read their expirience.

[Hamsandwich]

Hey I went out of my way not to mention that publicly. 

I'll get round to asking the locals, sometime.

FYI, they aren't that bad, they are free dont'ya know.  I've never had to pay for a Usenet subscription yet.

Haven't got any more info on my problem yet, it's just so strange that everything downloads fine. 'cept the first file in queue sticks as I've said, all subsequent ones come down fine. I pause everything else to get the stuck one to finish, then unpause, and the next file which has now become the first in queue sticks in the same way.

It's uncanny that it's happening all the time with these files, I have a feeling that I may just live with it till they are done (in like two months ) and find that everything else works fine as it did before.

[Jesus]

Well there's news and news2, right? The SA users are saying you only get 2 connections total.  News2 though, it resolves to 2 IP addresses.  You could try 1 connection to each of the IP addresses, and 3 connections might work.  If not you're stuck with 2 total.  I think they're running NNTPSwitch software and with that they are easily overloaded.