Hints on resolving speed issues to Astraweb servers via direct server's IP

[Hypatia]

i just wanted to add something concernign astraweb.

IF you have different routes to different AW servers then you might use a trick=)

Giganews has just 2 IP addresses assigned to their 2 servers, supernews has just one

But
Astraweb has got shitload of server IP addresses both for normal and ssl servers.
Sometimes due to the route between your ISP and AW's servers, your speed might be slow depending on how the flow of data goes.
So you can do for instance "nslookup eu.news.astraweb.com" and get up to 8 different Ip addresses and try them all.

It saved my speed several times. All morning and day i had great speed to the server XXX but it dropped heavily in the evening, so i ran "tracert servers IP address", checked the route, then chose another Ip address that had different route.

And voila! My speed was back to max.

Hope this helps one day.

PS
ive just checked all servers IPs that have a similar route crippling at this time of day my speed.

All these servers were slow.So it has nothing to do with servers but with the route.

When i checked several servers with another route they worked OK..

But still we must assume that different servers might give us different speed at different time

PS Example:


Tracert to one of the AW servers(the last part):
*****

7 * 78 ms 69 ms de-cix.ohtele.com [80.81.192.165]
8 62 ms 60 ms 734 ms xe-2-2-0.bb1.ams1.nl.gbxs.net [193.27.64.122]
9 60 ms 59 ms 61 ms netrouting.xe-2-4-0.bb1.ams1.nl.gbxs.net [77.243
180.150]
10 63 ms 63 ms 62 ms unknown.ams.astraweb.com [193.202.122.135]

Tracert to another AW server:

7 66 ms 65 ms 65 ms xe-4-2-0.bb2.lon1.uk.gbxs.net [195.66.224.231]
8 69 ms 69 ms 68 ms xe-4-4-0.bb1.lon2.uk.gbxs.net [193.27.64.78]
9 70 ms 71 ms 70 ms xe-2-3-0.bb1.ams1.nl.gbxs.net [193.27.64.81]
10 75 ms 74 ms 76 ms 193.27.64.53
11 71 ms 71 ms 72 ms netrouting.xe-2-4-0.bb1.ams1.nl.gbxs.net [77.243
180.150]
12 77 ms 76 ms 77 ms unknown.ams.astraweb.com [193.202.122.144]

Today, in the evening all servers that have the route #1 have been extremely slow for me( 900-KB-1.2 MB) so far

But servers that have the route #2 have been maxing out my connection

Sometimes its vice versa. It depends on what is happening "in between"

So dont rush blaming your ISP or AW.

[zot]

Excellent detective work, Hypatia.

That's something I'm sure most of us never even thought of.

But to me it seems like something that the user should never have to do manually -- optimizing IP addresses and routings is something that probably should be done automatically by the news client and/or the server.

I'd imagine it shouldn't be too hard for a newsreader developer to write simple code for such IP-testing routine. Maybe they all need to have this suggested?

[Hypatia]

how do you suppose it might work?
newsreader detects that speed is lower than XXX and tries to use different IP address?
to be honest i dont see how it can be done automatically without glitches and its not like everyone out there has different routes to these servers=) ive got just two(i guess that depends on how ones' ISP runs its traffic).

[zot]

Here's a slightly different situation I've thought of before, but similar in concept:


Let's say a user in Australia or Japan notices that at the same time each day, and lasting for 2 or 3 hours, the US server is slow. At another time each day, the EU server is slow. One solution to this issue would be to manually switch servers (again and again) in the newsreader to avoid this 'peak-time' congestion.

Another solution would be to have a newsreader that employs some type of dynamic server balancing.

It could work this way: When starting a download, the client opens connections to both the US and EU servers: 4 connections on each server. If the US server is currently downloading a lot faster, then 3 connections are closed on the EU server, and 3 connections opened on the US server, making the ratio 7US:1EU. If the download speed is still slow (such as when downloading old files) the client then opens up additional connections, up to the maximum. When the server speeds change, the client would sense this and automatically re-shift connections to the stronger server. Also, the total number of server connections would dynamically vary, automatically adjusting as required to achive maximum bandwidth using the minimum number of connections.

Additional feature: The desired baseline (max) speed could be determined over time based on a weighted rolling average, so a user would not even need to input his internet connection's bandwidth, as the newsreader would figure this out. The newsreader could also be programmed to figure out the maximum number of connections a provider/server allows (which in practice can be a lot less than they tell you).

Would this sort of dynamic server balancing be a useful feature? I think it would be, considering the many users who complain of (temporarily) slow speeds (and even dump their USP) when all they had to do was increase the number of connections, or switch to the other server (or use both servers simultaneously) to bring their speed back up.

[topgun100]

one idea could be to add all the servers to your local hosts file like

server1.astra 80.81.192.165
server2.astra 80.81.192.166
....

Then add all 8 server connections in your client with the same priority. This way you will connect to all the servers and should get a decent speed.

[zot]

That's an interesting concept, topgun. My question is, would any more than a tiny fraction of people ever take the time to set up something like that? (Or is the 'ancient' art of tweaking a lost science these days?) I'm sticking to my original belief that a newsreader should do this sort of thing automatically.