I assume that "it was all fine on Virgin Media" sort of covers off that OPs hardware and network is not the issue

Have you tried hooking your PC direct to the ONT and seeing what the speeds are like? Maybe the bundled router is causing issues.

Edited by jpm (Sun 12-Dec-21 16:33:20)

That is a good point.

That reminds me of another issue I've seen, which is SSDs which can write at full speed for the first couple of minutes, and then drop down to some very slow speed: I have seen as low as 10MB/sec. I believe this is due to thermal throttling, which is not something the manufacturers trumpet about.

The thermal throttling in turn is caused by having to do block-erases of partly used blocks. You can make this much better by turning on TRIM, which allows the filesystem to tell the SSD which 128K ranges are no longer used, and can then be erased in the background.

Another more drastic option is to do a full SSD erase. This must be done via a special ATA command, not just by "reformatting" the disk in the OS.

However, if the drive that you're writing your USENET files to is a traditional spinning hard drive rather than an SSD, then this issue won't apply.

I would say that anyone who buys a service faster than 200 or 300Mbps, is likely to find that it highlights deficiencies in their home network, wifi, and/or client devices.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

I would say that anyone who buys a service faster than 200 or 300Mbps, is likely to find that it highlights deficiencies in their home network, wifi, and/or client devices.

Yes. Untangling the real root cause(s) for the lay person can be challenging

It's a dedicated server with sabnzb and was able to handle a 500 virgin media connection no problems for quite sometime.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Ask them what their maximum speed is per connection.

I had no issue with the VM 500 connection get throttled so this is why i think it might be be shell.

Eueka is what I use and 50 connections on my package

In reply to a post by AlistairS:

Running Speedtests I get the full speed. However, when I start downloading via usenet I get full speed initially but quickly drops off to around a ffth of my quoted speed. Never had this with Virgin Media.

Do you experience the same issue with large file downloads from for example TBB Download Test Files page.

What's your elapsed download time for the 1GB file?

I downloaded a 10GB test file on SabNZB and initially got full speed but it soon dropped off

Could be a server issue or an issue further upstream from your ISP network. The larger and further away the file is located the more vagaries that are completely out of control

What newsswever / where are you pulling files from? Can you post a traceroute?

What about the TBB test files as noted - you should be able to pull that 1GB file down in around 10-12 seconds.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Could be a server issue or an issue further upstream from your ISP network. The larger and further away the file is located the more vagaries that are completely out of control

What newsswever / where are you pulling files from? Can you post a traceroute?

What about the TBB test files as noted - you should be able to pull that 1GB file down in around 10-12 seconds.

I am using Eweka in Netherlands. Their support asked for a traceroute which I have sent them. I am not at home just now so can't try that download just now

In reply to a post by AlistairS:

I am using Eweka in Netherlands.

What's the round-trip time if you ping them?

The maximum throughput of a single TCP stream drops off rapidly with RTT in the presence of even small amounts of packet loss:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_tuning#Packet_loss

e.g. with 20ms RTT and 0.01% packet loss (1 in 10,000 packets), max throughput is

1460/0.02/sqrt(0.0001) = 7300000 bytes/sec = 58.4 Mbps

If your USENET feed consists of multiple concurrent TCP streams, then the limit applies to each stream separately so is less likely to be the problem. OTOH, if it uses multiple concurrent streams to deliver the backlog, then only a single stream to deliver the newly arriving articles, it might be why the throughput drops off.