Originally Posted by
zot
Your CPU utilization graph will look like a series of mesas - each mesa representing a text-to-binary decoding cycle- and the faster your download speed, the closer together these mesas get. When the valleys between mesas disappear (which for this decade-old laptop was @ about 20 megabit/sec download speed) then the decoding starts getting backlogged, which besides suffering from the usual problems of a maxed-out processor, it means the PC is at that point running at its fastest effective download speed, regardless of the actual line speed.
There are also ways to set thread priority/CPU utilization so Alt.Binz's decoding spikes don't cause delays with other running processes. My main concern would be how fast is a newsreader allowed to download before maxing out the processor continuously. So for me right now, it's not a big issue. But if I had a gigabit internet connection (and anything less than a "super"-computer) alt.binz would obviously be totally unsuitable.
Just as a casual observation, it seemed to me that most other news clients I've tried, such as Grabit, BNR, NNTPgrab, Xnews, and others used at least as much CPU as Altbinz, though I've never done a formal comparison. (Usenet Explorer is exceptional - kind of like the µTorrent of news clients.) One problem is that news clients have traditionally written downloaded articles to HDD, then turned around and read them back off HDD when decoding (rather than just holding the 15 or 50 MB worth of articles in memory) so that the excess read/write redundancy adds to decoding. I'm not sure if altbinz's settings allow changing this, but I think i remember that function being added a year or so ago.
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