Giganews continues skips/fades, generating lots of complaints

Just in case everyone 'fergot' about it, although I did notice some improvement over the last week of better completion, I've also noticed a LOT of complaints in the newsgroups that GN is literally falling apart in front of folks eyeballs.

The last few days, in the groups I heavily monitor, they were doing fairly well; then literally right at midnight (00:01) Sunday morning it was 'off the tracks' completely, on average only picking up 3-5% of parts! Now, the paths have remained about the same over the last couple of weeks, with their main 'feed' this Russian site, and also fed through a dutch site as well (to me, the worse of both worlds).

Those providers who utilize GN as their primary peers are, of course, getting the same lousy completion rate. I'll try doing some deeper checks later on (6 hours from now) particularly with Blocknews, and see if they get a jump on 'back-filling' all those skips (right now, their completion rate is as bad as GN).

What's interesting is that the comments in the newsgroups are almost identical to one another; when folks complain at GN, they invariably come back with 'it must be DMCA removals, not our bad operation'. Right.

What's interesting is I took the time (and effort) to do some 'deep inspection' on both Astra/US and EU earlier, and they are both 'clean as a whistle' with little if any skips and such, even though in the case of Astra/EU it appears their main peer at present is a dutch provider, eweka.nl. Of course, they also probably get some decent 'back-fill' from the US plant as well. But no Russian in their paths.

So, for those GN users, if you are having problems with completion, if you don't have or use Astra as a 'fills' provider, I'd back off and wait a day or two (or three) and see if things do get back-filled' (once again).

Users need to vote with their dollars. When a provider has unresolved issues for a period of time, moving on is best for everyone. Better service for you, motivation to fix their wagon for them.

For what it's worth. Giganews demands too high a premium for what they are.

I think a lot (at least those who've been around for awhile) have already done this a long, long, time ago. Every plant runs into some kind of minor/major problem every year or so, maybe it's because folk (myself included) figure that the 'high-priced spread' should operate a bit above the typical pack. Right.

Well, about 12 hours or so ago, it slipped right back onto the track, just in time for my power utility to suffer the third major outage in the last week. It's not like the weather (locally) has been bad, but virtually all of the electric comes from some 200 miles away through the mountains, and wind/rain/snow 'events' typically cascade the problems down to the shoreline. Fun ensues. I guess that through the last 2 winters no extended outages, so this year (just from this last week) I'm bracing for the worst.

But at least GN seems to be back on track. I'll wait a couple of days and do some checking as to if all the skips from the last couple of days get 'filled in'.

I don't have a problem with " Every plant runs into some kind of minor/major problem every year or so" but I DO have a problem with "'it must be DMCA removals, not our bad operation" approach.

I wish they got class action lawsuit against them...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hypatia

I don't have a problem with " Every plant runs into some kind of minor/major problem every year or so" but I DO have a problem with "'it must be DMCA removals, not our bad operation" approach.

I wish they got class action lawsuit against them...

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I'd just love to have me a Giganews account....as long as it was free and I didn't have to use it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by nntpjunkie

I'd just love to have me a Giganews account....as long as it was free and I didn't have to use it.

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I have the cheapest that was available several years ago, they've let me keep it (~$3/month). Just enough to keep my hand in to what is going on, on a somewhat daily basis.

Again, since so many plants are heavily peered with them, it's worth it to be able to keep an eye on them.

'Stuff' from over the past few days is slowly (and I mean s-l-o-w-l-y) dribbling in, back-filling about one day for every day time continues forward. In short, skips from 3-4 days ago are going to take (at the current rate) about 3-4 days to dribble in.

Haven't got a change to check out Blocknews, but I will tomorrow. If things occur as in the past, they'll be going at 2-3 times the rate of GN is doing the back-fills.

UPDATE 8 Oct:

At some point early this day, GN pretty radically changed up it's peering (okay, yet again). This time, eliminating all the Euro/Russo pathways, and instead making the large US/NL plants 'up first', so that means that things posted on Astraweb (for instance) are now taking about 3 minutes max before appearing on GN.

Back-fills are still slowly crawling in, likewise with other plants. Maybe, just maybe, they 'took the hint' from the complaints and things are kinda back to 'normal', whatever that is/means. We'll see how long this lasts.