On Tue, 7 Mar 2006 18:47:01 -0000, Andy Watson
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> When Plusnot junks it binary service I'll be looking for a cheap news
> service. Does anyone know if Astraweb are any good?
> http://www.news.astraweb.com/
> I'm not a heavy user - probably 10-20GB per month maximum.
>
> For $10 you get 25GB which seems pretty good providing the retention and
> completeness are OK?
I reckon that with my setup I should get a theotical download speed of
2,043,832.01 bps (inclusive of TCP/IP headers). On the occasions I've
made sure that nothing else was running during a header download from
Astraweb, it has only managed an average of 2,020,806.39 bps - so
there is certainly room for improvement on the speed front ;-)
I can't really comment on completion since I only use Astraweb as a
fill-in for (a) my ISP's news server (which is quick, but has poor
retention and completeness) and (b) Claranews (which is limited to 64
Kbps per connection and which has variable completion). My 'binary
news downloader' (which is a multi-component DIY system) doesn't make
it easy to figure out which article was downloaded from which server
(just because the client end requests an article from Astraweb, the
'proxy' component will still try to fetch it, by Message-ID, from my
ISP's server first - and you might be surprised how many times some
servers will return articles requested by M-ID, even though they never
appeared in the XOVER headers). Also my client (currently) only
reports overall completion across all servers (which is only very
rarely less than 100%) and it doesn't report completion rates for
individual servers (which are, after all, irrelvant). Astraweb
certainly contributes to the overall completion rate, but I can't say
what it's own completion is. FWIW, on my current usage (around 15GB
per month) my 25GB Astraweb 'block' will last for another 8 years.
Retention is certainly better than 'average', although nothing like
Giganews - but as with completeness, it doesn't bother me that much
since my downloader 'scans' XOVER headers for articles which match
pre-defined regex patterns and queues them for automatic download
(after a delay, to give them a chance to appear on my ISP's server,
and subject to an article with the same Subject line (there's a
'fuzzy' search alogithm which usually works) not having been download
previously). If you grab articles within a few hours of them
appearing, retention doesn't really matter that much.
Paying Astraweb for a 25GB block was money well-spent for me. You get
XOVER headers for 'free' (i.e. not deducted from your allowance), so
as a fill-in server it is very cost-efefctive :-)
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