Astraweb - slow speeds

[ravx25]

Has anyone else had issues with Astraweb on Sunday nights? I normally d/l at 3.6 MB/s but on Sunday nights I'm only getting around 400KB/s for about the past 2 months. I have Verizon FIOS so it certainly can't be my connection. Its' only Sunday nights. I'm seriously thinking about switching providers. Are other providers having this issue?

[Hypatia]

much depends on routing between your ISP and AW. so if some network is overloaded in between so to speek you get low speeds.
i experienced it myself. and a friend of mine used to use AW but one day he noticed the speed started fluctuating and became very slow sometimes so he ran tracerout and it turned out traffic between his ISP and AW started going through different routes.. so he switched to supernews.

[sandman_1]

No problems here. I downloaded around 4GB just last night and was getting 4.1MBps on my 30Mbps line.

[nntpjunkie]

No problems here. I downloaded around 4GB just last night and was getting 4.1MBps on my 30Mbps line.

Oh how I wish I had that speed....but hey 12Mbit ain't to shabby :)

[johhny]

there is no such thingh as slow speeds on usenet

[Sporkk]

I have been experiencing this as well but not necessarily on sundays.

[bijoy]

I never faced slow speed problem from astraweb.

[cola]

Sometimes AW will get slow at night when a bunch of TV shows start getting posted. Could be from so many people downloading at once, but most of the time I've never had a problem.

[mark780]

no slow speeds on sunday night but had slow speed on the monday but that was just once

[Beck38]

Has anyone else had issues with Astraweb on Sunday nights? I normally d/l at 3.6 MB/s but on Sunday nights I'm only getting around 400KB/s for about the past 2 months. I have Verizon FIOS so it certainly can't be my connection. Its' only Sunday nights. I'm seriously thinking about switching providers. Are other providers having this issue?

Astraweb/US does server maintenance on Sunday evenings, I avoid using them during that time period. I've complained several times that they need to move that to some dark hours during the middle of the week, to no avail.

Right as I'm typing this, DNS services for a lot of the servers in the SF/Bay area are flat on their face; you know, folks like Astraweb/US, ebay, etc. A few days ago, some folks were doing BGP router updates, and they crashed a pretty large portion of the internet in the US, it's possible the same knuckleheads are doing the same 'maintenance' today. Us lowly users will probably find out about it in the next day or so (keep an eye on Wired or Ars Technica).

I might add that today, it also appears that Astraweb/US is having problems with their SSL connections. One thing on top of another.

[ravx25]

Well its good to know it's not just me. I can't figure that it would Verizon b/c FIOS has been nothing short of spectacular to me. I guess I may have to look for another provider. Anyone have a good recommendation similar to AW?

[Beck38]

Nope. I'll 'assume' that you are on the east coast of the US, as Verizon has completely pulled out of the west (all Frontier now for over a year), so unless you want to deal with the servers located around Virginia/DC, you're stuck with either staying with Astra in San Jose, or moving to Giganews in LA, both of which are across the continent from you (and although Giganews is premium, you pay a premium price for having to dodge the 'takedowns' which latest news has found is mostly bogus).

I run close to FIOS speeds and, except for that Sunday PM, don't have any more problems with Astra then any other server. But then, they're extremely close to my location tracert wise. You probably need to perhaps ramp down your 'need for speed' a bit and realize that you need to 'back off' a bit, and realize that Netflix is cheaper and easier in the long run.

[zot]

I seem to remember that during one of Astraweb's previous missing-article episodes (the last one about a year and a half before the big Christmas 2009 brownout) there was also a speed problem, and Tech guru "Steve Foster" said the reason for the slow download speed was that the process of back-filling the missing articles consumed bandwidth that would have otherwise been available for customers.

This was posted on the Newsbin forum, but sadly all of those old posts have since been deleted, and it seems that Steve has not been quite as visible (nor as forthcoming) on Newsbin.com in recent years when Astraweb has had problems.

This 'sealed-lip' trend is not just with Astraweb, but other companies as well. Maybe some of you remember the pre-Highwinds era when providers like Easynews and Newshosting would publicly post every day-to-day glitch they went through; now they all keep silent no matter how bad things get. That's my biggest complaint. I understand that any company will have technical problems occasionally; that really doesn't bother me. But I consider it inexcusable that these days just about every major usenet company --Giganews, Highwinds, and Astraweb for sure-- tries to hide their problems from their customers and pretend that nothing is wrong.

[sandman_1]

I agree, keeping customers in the dark is just going to hurt you down the road. They definitely need to be more transparent.

[mjmacky]

On the flip side of that, announcing that you're actively addressing problems with the fidelity of copyrighted material on your server could be a bit of a legal liability, no? It sort of makes it harder to claim ignorance of the contents when you're quite outspoken about it. Thus, if everyone else keeps a lid on, why would you want to keep your neck out?

[dapofrost]

For the first time in over a year since I started using Astraweb I am getting very low speeds. Getting Max speed of 900KB/s. Normally I get 1.8MB/s. Why is this happening?

[fastplumb]

Astraweb has more than one server if your having problems maybe you should try connecting to the others, I have 5 connections running on all 3 ssl servers and have never had any problems

Secure Server:
ssl.astraweb.com Ports 443 or 563

ssl-eu.astraweb.com Ports 443 or 563 (European)

ssl-us.astraweb.com Ports 443 or 563 (US)

Maximum Connections:
20 connections

[ravx25]

This past Sunday was the best one that I think I've seen. I was able to download my files at around 2.5-3 MB/s which I will absolutely take. It may not be my normal 3.6, but maybe AW is fixing some network issues. Maybe they had enough people complain about it. :yup:

[leroya1]

Im still haveing problems on sunday night files will not finish

[Beck38]

There have been several (I started at least 2-3 or so) on this Sunday PM slowdowns. It stopped happening about 6 months ago, and stayed away for 2-3 months; then came back.

Simply AVOID trying to do transfers between around 6pm to around 11pm (Pacific time). My ISP is doing some heavy line maintenance tonight as well, so I just shut things down until tomorrow morning. Things cannot be so important as that loosing 5 hours or so in a week (of 168 hours) isn't going to 'break the bank'. Whip out mr. calculator, that's 3% lost. BFD

[piercerseth]

Using the EU servers like fastplumb suggested usually works. Otherwise you could dip into your block provider, if you have one.